001it's 703 i think we'll get uh get started so i'd like to call this special meeting of the board of education to order uh and if we could please get the flag we'll do the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice thank you all right so thank you everybody for attending our special meeting this is a business meeting of the board of ed before i start just uh talk about a few things to help us out so this meeting is uh probably the last uh being conducted pursuant to the governor's executive order 7b uh per that order we're actually recording the meeting as well as streaming it online and videos
002of that will be found on our web page uh you know feel free to like it on our youtube channel uh for those paying attention our our main meeting will likely be at central middle school in person so uh for the folks that are on now i'll just uh announce that just so you know um more details forthcoming on that uh but the agenda for the meeting tonight is found on our board doc's website you can get there by going to greenwichschools.org clicking on board of education and then you see the meetings box if you click that it'll take you over to board docs and you can click on tonight's meeting to get the agenda uh we're taking public comments tonight we've got speakers signed up if you didn't get an opportunity to sign up
003you can always send an email to the entire board of education by sending a single email to board of ed members at greenwich.k12.ct.us again that's board of ed members at greenwich.k12 uh the meeting tonight is going to consist of discussion uh by and among the superintendent board members uh the administrative team and i don't know if we we've got some guests joining us for uh for special recognitions which is great um i'd ask everybody to please stay on mute when they're not speaking i'd ask participants to state their name every time they speak unless i've called on you we need to do that for the record uh we'll be using the raise the hand function when we get to our discussion and i'd ask board members to keep their uh their comments concise and every
004everybody gets an opportunity to speak and any voting will be done by roll call okay thank you for uh sticking with us i know a lot of you have heard that a number of times so uh the first the next item on our agenda is the consent agenda is there a motion to approve the consent agenda mr kelly is there a second oh second miss hirsch all right i'm going to take a roll call vote on the consent agenda just making sure there's no hands all right bernstein is a yes stow yes hirsch yes downey yes kelly yes kowalski yes olsen yes and share yes thank you that passes zero all right so this is a a fun time we've got actually some staff recognitions tonight uh joining us are diana urbanowski and brian zeller
005the pta uh co-presidents at central middle school take it away hi everyone thank you so much for letting us acknowledge our amazing principal tom healey brian and i are so happy that the connecticut pta has awarded him the outstanding administrator middle school principal 2021 we are excited for him he has been amazing this year as well as really all of our um greenwich public school staff administration this was a really tough year we all waited with baited breath to see how we were going to get back tom healy has been 24 7 responsive to everyone we received a lot of outpouring of love for him a 45 page nomination packet with a video was sent over to the connecticut pta um and he won so we are very excited we thank everyone who wrote in
006who sent videos we also thanked the connecticut pta for um for sponsoring this award this year we know there were many deserving candidates and we know that it was a tough decision for them so we thank them for pouring through countless probably submissions and we are super excited i hope tom is on here we just want to congratulate him um and we think it's great for the community it's great for greenwich it's great for tom and us thank you brian i don't know if you had anything you wanted to add nope brian's all good just on a a personal note mr healey started at central when uh when my oldest started at the middle school and uh you know we're leaving at the end of this year uh to head to the high school with
007our our youngest but uh you know we're gonna miss central uh it's been a great experience mr dealey with you at the uh at the helm so uh congratulations to you for your recognition all right with that our next item is the 2021 distinguished t-church cather bonnetti hi peter good evening members of the board of education superintendent members of the cabinet and to all who have joined this meeting my name is kathy burnetti and i'm the chair of the distinguished teachers award committee i have the distinct pleasure to share with you our six distinguished teachers for this year before i do that i would like to acknowledge our outgoing committee members board of education representative megan olson gene schmidt argosha rep our treasurer cindy lyle and christine edwards our kiwanis rep they have all given
008so much of their time and energy to recognize and support our teachers so thank you very much now to introduce our six distinguished teachers these teachers are amazing educators and in reviewing their nominations it has been incredible to see the impact that they have had on their students colleagues and school communities please join me in congratulating jennifer bressler a district secondary instructional coach jennifer dunn north north miami school 4th grade teacher allison fallon central middle school english language arts teacher bruce johnson eastern middle school science and mathematics teacher jane martellino international school at dundee library media specialist and susan zerman north street school third grade teacher congratulations to these six teachers we are honored to recognize you and look forward to celebrating you further on in the future on tuesday may 4th at our virtual
009zoom ceremony i encourage everyone to join us for that special occasion thank you again and congratulations to all thank you kathy thanks to the committee i know it's a lot of work i read a lot of submissions on on our amazing teachers and it's not always easy picking six so looking forward to the ceremony on the fourth thank you all right so our next item is our public hearing we're going to start with comments from our ghs student government do we have mark and meredith with us meredith you should be able to talk hello okay awesome um hello to all the members of the board and to the people observing the meeting tonight my name is meredith blanchard and i'm the ghs senior class president i want to thank you all again for graciously devoting
010time to student voices at each meeting coming out of spring break and charging ahead into quarter four i have some updates to share first i wanted to express continued excitement about our ability to move forward with both proms and graduation seniors and juniors alike are thrilled to have the opportunity for a more traditional spring celebration i also wanted to thank dr jones for working with the community health center of stanford in order to open up ghs specific vaccine slots for many students navigating the vam system proved to be difficult and i believe that this clinic will likely accelerate the rate at which greenwich high school students may be vaccinated while a vaccine is not mandated i believe that every shot contributes toward making our school community safer and one step closer to opening up fully
011again on the subject of opening school up fully again i want to express a desire among specifically the senior class to be back in school together again during our last months as greenwich students many seniors wish to have a special community moment with each other what this would ideally look like would be one week where only seniors attend in-person school to ask underclassmen to learn remotely from home for a week may seem extreme but it is actually only a difference of two days because a given cohort is actually only in person for two days at a time i ask you to consider this as an option to honor our seniors and the last year and a half of regular school that they missed out on i will wrap up by stating that i am incredibly
012optimistic for this spring and for the gradual return to a sense of normalcy thank you all again for supporting us our school community i will now we'll now turn the mic over to our student body president mark chen good evening chairman bernstein dr jones members of the board cabinet and meeting attendees my name is mark chen student body president at greenwich high school i remember saying this back in january or february but time really does go by so fast we're already approaching the end of april the election process for student government officers including its executive committee is well underway and will conclude at the end of may so hopefully we will be joined by the new student body president and senior class president in our june meeting greenwich high school students are grateful to mr
013mayo and our school administration for making the right decision to not have finals this year it would have been extremely challenging to ensure an equitable experience in a hybrid model alongside the fact that we did not have midterms either and as teacher appreciation weekenders we are hoping to do a gratitude week where students can fill out gratitude grams to be sent to faculty and staff similar to the process we coordinated around valentine's day earlier this year a possible theme day we were brainstorming was meditation monday where mr mayo would lead greenwich high school through a guided meditation and i truly hope that we can make this happen and finally the second annual live like luke beach cleanup will be taking place at tots point this saturday from 11 to 3 in honor of former ghs
014student luke myers and his passion for environmentalism in continuing my discussion of some longer standing topics of interest from our last meeting i'd like to discuss briefly the future of opportunity block at ghs as a sophomore i was on the opportunity block stakeholder committee where we reflected upon the very first year of ob and its quite rigid implementation my junior year which was last year more freedoms were afforded to students with seniors being able to leave at 2 45 and athletes being allowed to go to practice ob was certainly not as much of a topic of discussion this year as it was in the past largely because other priorities took precedence and the early staggered dismissal model greatly shortened its length anyways nevertheless the fact this fact of our ghs schedule is one that is
015important to consider as we move into a more normal next year i still believe that an unstructured period of time brings great value to students we did after all go through the laborious process of implementing this in the first place what i would like to emphasize about ob though is that there have been so many discussions already held in the past and many different solutions proposed i'm thinking most prominently of former ghs students and student government executive committee members lucas gazianis and toby hirsch who are fierce advocates for ob reformation while we should certainly gather the latest feedback we also do not need to repeat the same conversations this is a perfect opportunity for positive innovation and we can and should improve what exists thank you for your time tonight it is always a pleasure
016thank you very much mark and meredith appreciate your comments i can't believe the elections are already happening you're already talking about the end of the year this one fast next up is the gea comments carol sutton good evening board members dr jones cabinet and members of the greenwich public school community on zoom my name is carol sutton and i'm honored to represent 900 members of the greenwich education association congratulations to this evening's faculty honorees particularly the class of 2021 distinguished teachers jennifer dunn jen bressler allison fallon bruce johnson jane martellino and susan zerman these six professionals epitomize the qualities that make greenwich educators the best of the best they are lifelong learners who inspire their students and their colleagues each and every day they contribute to their schools and communities and introduce their students to
017a world of people and ideas that though vast is increasingly accessible to all through the internet we are so proud of these teachers and we look forward to further celebration on may 4th we also congratulate tom healy principal of central middle school it's been a while since tom was a social studies teacher at ghs but i know his experience in the classroom contributed greatly to his success as a principal and while we're congratulating this evening's honorees i want to give a well-deserved shout out to every teacher administrator and staff member in our schools they have all distinguished themselves during the past year by adapting to pandemic education and showing up for the students it has not been easy and we're not out of the woods as much as we would like to be we trust
018that dr jones and her team will continue to enforce covet safety protocols so that we can end the school year safely we're excited on the vote for on the new mathematics program and appreciate the prominent role that teachers played on the textbook review committee we're also eager to hear the update on the board strategic plan since that will inform our work in the coming years we're also eager for the calendar to be set because everyone wants to know when the last day of school is we are wondering though about the agenda item called curriculum implementation which was added to this agenda recently after 35 years in the district here's what i know about curriculum implementation every day hundreds of grants educators teach to their program and grade level curriculum with standards essential questions required core
019texts and supplemental materials they create lessons based on best practices and emerging trends and use a multitude of strategies to engage their students with the hope that their teaching will not just stick but motivate inspire and even set a course for a student's future sometimes a lesson flops or an application is over the kids heads but teachers are professionals they confer with colleagues and administrators they assess they learn from their mistakes they adapt and adjust for the next lesson or unit and their instruction evolves the curriculum evolves too according to policy and established practices and by most mothers granite measures granite is a wonderful school system with solid student outcomes that's why many teachers are wondering whether today's review of curriculum implementation is truly the most pressing issue for the board of ed right now
020i've reached the end of my time so thank you for providing a place for gea to speak each month and we look forward to a productive meeting i'll send additional comments in writing thank you all right next up is pta council uh brian pelle dunas good evening you are unmuted yep can you hear me yes good good evening i'm brian paldunas president of pta council representing the 15 school ptas and the families of all of their members pta council congratulates tom healey on being awarded the 2021 connecticut pta outstanding administrator award for a middle school principal try to fit that on the award plaque uh we also offer our congratulations to all of our 2021 outstanding teachers thank you and thank you to all of our teachers and staff for your efforts on behalf of
021our students especially in this most interesting year and thank you to the central middle school pta for putting mr healey's name forward next thursday april 29th pta council in the league of women voters along with the greenwich public schools are sponsoring a discussion on fixing greenwich public schools infrastructure go to the league of women voters website to register and to ask a question or two speaking of infrastructure pta council asks all parties involved to work to expedite the repairs to north miana school we recognize there are differences of opinion about the appropriate process but we reiterate the belief that our students are best served educationally and emotionally by being in their own school building as soon as possible as always some follow-up items we urge the board to support gps as they explore steps to
022alleviate chromebook issues particularly at the high school level we continue to emphasize the desirability of placing additional updated or corrected information requested by the board of education on the district website in a location easily accessible to all preferably linked to the original board dock finally we reiterate pta council's desire to participate in the needed follow-on work as described in the alp report on tonight's agenda pta council welcomes the much needed focus on curriculum development implementation consistency excellence and transparency the academic excellence committee will be speaking later this evening to provide more thoughts on this topic clearly curriculum is at the heart of what we all want for our students a good education also on tonight's agenda is a preview of a community survey to assist the strategic planning committee we look forward to the discussion
023of the survey and we have a few suggestions to assist clarity for survey takers which will we will relay offline finally last month i spoke about the academic and social emotional issues facing students as well as the need to look forward or to look beyond covid we look forward to further updates on plans for this fall and as an added note as we we sincerely hope that even with in-person meetings hopefully starting again next month that virtual attendance will still be available and town residents will continue to attend either in person or virtually thank you all right thank you very much brian um all right next up we have our community comments uh i want to remind speakers that they get per our policy it's policy 9325 each speaker gets three minutes i would ask
024that you please be respectful um you can offer objective criticism of district operation and programs but we encourage you to address complaints concerning individuals uh through the uh proper chain of command uh speakers can express themselves in a civil manner with due respect for dignity and privacy of others who may be affected by their comments uh you have to be aware that uh statements that violate the rights of others under the law of defamation or invasion of privacy the speaker could be held personally liable so i just want to remind you of that we just ask uh please be civil and try to stop you if you're not and give you some guidance all right with that our first speaker is theresa hirsch you just need to unmute based on the emails uh sign up
025i have a kevin hirsch um i believe that is them kevin kevin you just need to unmute okay we'll give you another second to figure that out um all right somehow we seem to have lost you we'll look for you again in a little bit we'll come back to you uh next speaker is jackie holman mr bernstein i want to know why you personally failed to uphold your own strict code of ethics and why you allowed an employee to promote misinformation about coveted vaccines to the greenwich community i want to know why you failed to take action over this serious issue peter and instead issued me a gfy letter and ignored my repeated requests to provide complete and truthful information based on facts sourced directly from the cdc and the vaccine manufacturers themselves just like
026tony ignored me and just like the pta so much for living in a community that allegedly values diversity and inclusion your opinions only matter if you share the same liberal views espoused by the majority of the people who populate the board and fill the seats in the pta but your voice gets silenced if you find yourself amongst the group of parents like me who are horrified at the changes we're seeing in our schools horrified at the disgusting inappropriate sexualized content being presented to our children horrified that the high school athletic coaches are pressuring teenagers into becoming part of a medical experiment for fear they'll get sidelined and bullied by their peers horrified that our teenagers are being unlawfully denied summer employment unless they take the unfluenced experimental vaccine i have repeatedly provided information to you
027peter sourced directly from the cdc and the manufacturers of the vaccines themselves clearly demonstrating that dr noble and subsequently dr jones have lied about the vaccines to parents in tony's own words she sees no difference between the terms fda approved and emergency use authorization the difference is meaningful the nuremberg code exists to stop people from unwillingly becoming part of a medical experiment which is exactly what people are doing when they take the unapproved experimental mrna gene therapies described by the manufacturer as the software of life these are not vaccines in the traditional sense and the clinical trials aren't due to share results until 2023 that is exactly how you know that you become part of a medical experiment just read the package inserts and learn for yourself i already sent them to you conveniently highlighted
028so that you can see the shocking words for yourself if you bother to look instead though you've allowed a town employee who's not even from our community of greenwich to directly email students and tell them to seek vaccination without their parents knowledge our schools should never have a role in dividing parents and their children and that is exactly what tony is doing when she emails students directly the potential legal risk she is imposing on the district with her reckless communications that lack all informed consent is frightening like all other medical interventions vaccines should be a personal medical decision not a decision influenced by a school employee with a record of misinformation peter did you already have warning signs about tony jones character and ethics when you did due diligence in the hiring process did you
029look at what fairfield county schools said or what falls church city said because apparently she's had some issues before so i'm putting the board of need on notice time allowing the shameful behavior to michael can we please turn thank you thank you very much well again remind speakers of our policy if you can't be civil we will turn your microphone off we don't want to do that so please do take that into account our next speaker is anna labord i'm sorry if i mispronounced your name can you hear me yes good evening my name is anna laborda and i along with jessica and wright polinish are the co-chairs of pta council's academic excellence committee our committee advocates for excellence in the gps curriculum across the entire district and promotes family engagement in student learning by
030facilitating communication between the schools and parents we chose to speak tonight based on our ongoing work with and in support of mr d'amico and his presentation to the board our committee has members from all 15 schools and our mandate from them is clear parents want consistency transparency and excellence first there should be consistency in instruction across grades and schools fourth graders at new labs should be learning the same lessons using the same vetted resources as fourth graders at parkway one twin should not spend their entire year writing in cursive while the other twin down the hall spends only two weeks that is not equitable instruction we need an established curriculum that is taught with fidelity across classrooms and schools and all subject areas foundations and big ideas math are examples of what we would like
031to see across the board second we want transparency and communication in regards to curriculum information shared with parents while we have the utmost faith in our teachers and administrators as the experts that they are many gps parents today especially in k-5 do not know what their kids are learning we do not want to tell our teachers how or what to teach but we do want to know how we can support our children parents need more transparency and communication regarding curriculum in the form of online syllabi web pages newsletters and additional parent teacher conference third we want excellence in our gps teaching and learning we know this is happening in many and most classrooms but there are gaps that must be addressed parents are concerned about skipped units in middle school math the rigor of our
032writing curriculum and why our kids are not learning to type or write cursive among other things we are so grateful for our incredibly talented teachers in this district who have been working tirelessly during this pandemic and years prior to them we say thank you we need to show that appreciation by giving them the tools they deserve to achieve excellence professional development vetted materials and curriculum maps with lessons of what to teach and when they cannot be simultaneously searching for or creating the curriculum while teaching it we commend gps's decision to conduct ongoing curriculum research development and writing throughout the year as well as having the appropriate teachers involved through many conversations with mr d'amico jessica and i have come to understand that his goals are very much aligned with ours we agree that excellence can
033only be achieved and evaluated when curriculum is implemented across the district with fidelity we know that many of these academic efforts take time and require funding from the budget our ptac committee looks forward to our continued work with mr d'amico and we hope that the board will join us in prioritizing and funding consistency transparency and excellence in greenwich public schools thank you all right thank you very much our next speaker is stephanie cowie good evening sharon bernstein superintendent dr jones and board of ed members i'm steph cowy and terry lamonte and i are currently the co-presidents at greenwich high school it certainly has been a challenging year filled with surprises for all of us it's hard to believe that we are now in the last semester of school for our seniors juniors sophomores and freshmen
034we are so thankful to all of you for keeping our kids safe and in school we continue to recognize the north mianas community and support all of your efforts for a speedy return to school for our north miami students and a congratulations to tom healey is being recognized by connecticut pga top middle school administrator as well as all of the distinguished as the discussion of the building committee is on your agenda this evening we hope that you envision a member of the greenwich high school pta as an active member of the building committee the completion of this entire project is very important to the ghs community as we have previously stated this stadium shouldn't be half built phase two including the visitor side bleachers new visitor side building and the important second egress exit roadway
035for greenwich high school cannot be forgotten we look forward to hearing more this evening regarding our seniors possibly returning to school and graduation our seniors and their families have been thrown so very much this past year we hope that they experience some time together as a class at greenwich high school as well as an in-person graduation surrounded by their family and friends our seniors are very deserving of these experiences and we know this can be achieved in a safe manner on behalf of our seniors and their families we thank you for your thoughtful planning and return to school and an in-person graduation we also thank you all for your continued efforts and support of our children faculty administrators thank you all and have a wonderful evening all right thank you very much the next speaker
036is francis wu no bae good evening this is francis funobe ptac remote school special committee co-chair our remote learners and gps teams teaching high flex and remotely have made it to the last marking period thank you for all your efforts in this unprecedented year did you catch the remote learner counts in dr jones's march family note as of march 23rd there were still 439 students remote learning at the elementary level that's down just 78 students from the october 22nd boe meeting placing the remote school as the third largest elementary school after north pianist and riverside schools at the secondary school level the counts are far above what was reported in october the count on march 23rd was 1 348 students up 522 students since october due to a large number of fully remote high schoolers
037as we look ahead our remote learning families are looking forward to re-entry programs to reacclimate reconnect and re-energize our neighborhood school communities in the meanwhile we make the most of our remote learning experience we are so very grateful to the greenwich alliance for education for fully funding virtual assemblies for our grade k through five remote learners in april our remote learners will enjoy an entertaining program on poetry and we especially thank gps's anthony stempien for logging on from paternity leave to run that program in may the remote school received additional funding to offer science and social studies assemblies tied to the curriculum thank you greenwich alliance for education and the many greenwich families who contributed to make these programs happen two more remote school shout outs one to the boys who have been running a
038weekly friday at noon virtual social club to help our remote learners connect the last session was attended by nearly 40 students and we are so appreciative of this social connection the other shout out is to danny rossi costco pta president and remote school parent volunteer danny is leading our remote school teacher appreciation week efforts and we look forward to supporting these special teachers lastly mark your calendar on friday may 7th at nine o'clock the remote school is hosting a parent meeting via zoom with the gps team please ping me or your remote school parent volunteer for registration details to close please stay safe stay healthy and let's end the year strong we are one school community thank you thank you very much all right we can try again i think it was kevin hirsch you
039can find kevin if he's on i now have a rose hirsch are you the hello oh i'm sorry can you hear me yes can you hear me can you please state your name yes this is teresa hirsch i'm sorry for the confusion oh no worries okay good evening greenwich community elected school board officials and chairman bernstein thank you for this opportunity to speak tonight i want to begin by mentioning how much our family absolutely loves greenwich public schools and teachers it is an amazing school district but we have personally felt a gap in this education experience this evening i want to follow up on a disturbing seven-minute internet video which described child rape to over 40 of our gps seven and eight-year-old students on april 9th during social emotional learning class despite the serious nature
040of this incident to this day greenwich public school officials led by tony jones have not come forward with any strategy to avoid a repeat of this type of incident specifically tony jones told the parents in two separate zoom calls that what teachers did was a hundred percent legal and there was no way that she could possibly limit any of the educational information taken from the internet or youtube and used by teachers throughout our school district first i ask you to consider that if greenwich public schools are using the lowest possible bar that is what is 100 legal as a boundary for what internet material can be used for educational plans in our classrooms this type of incident will definitely happen again it appears that the internet freedom that tony jones has given our teachers has
041set them up to fail without simple access to pre-approved internet video curriculum materials 40 children have lost two teachers this year one teacher with many years of experience and one brand new teacher just starting a career second despite the losses to our families in gps tony jones said clearly she sees no need for a policy change to support teachers in this area unfortunately second grade parents have not heard anything from the gps head of k-8 curriculum mark d'amico he has not written one email to our classes to restore our faith in the social emotional curriculum guidelines what if it had been a graphic video about a school shooting shown to our second graders would we be changing internet policy it feels like gps staff is giving child sexual assault a free pass here in 2021
042when hundreds of specific educational youtube channel subscriptions are available certainly greenwich public schools can identify a staff leader to provide our teachers with guidelines and easy access to excellent curriculum internet materials finally please give the parents of these two affected classes a private platform or survey to tell the boe about the response of gps leaders throughout this experience with their children this disturbing event was national news it was an embarrassment to greenwich public schools and the larger community i ask you who can lead gps and come up with secure educational internet strategy to protect both our young children and our teachers thank you thank you very much all right our next speaker is gary vasyewski and i probably mispronounced your name gary so i'm going to apologize for that gary if you could raise your
043hand so we could find you all right not seeing gary all right we'll move on to our next speaker then asuka ulrich can you hear me yes go ahead please dear members of the boe and parents my name is silke ulrich and i am the parent of three children in the greenwich public schools i also sit on the pta board at north myannas however i am speaking this evening as a parent and not as a representative of the pta i'm very concerned about the amount of emails i am receiving from gps regarding vaccinating our students this is not only inappropriate but it opens up our district to exposure medical decisions are a private family matter period it is not up to the school to promote any medical decisions especially those that aren't fully approved by
044the fda and are still in the clinical trial phase please refer to the fda website where it clearly states it is an emergency use approval and therefore cannot be mandated this is not a discussion on whether or not to take what's being called a vaccination i myself as well as my children are vaccinated in full for measles and all the other required fda approved vaccinations by the schedule provided by our community medical practitioners i'm not an anti-vaxxer however our schools do not have any right to promote any medical decision especially directly with emails to students without parents knowledge or consent in fact gps is going a step further by bribing students with no quarantining after exposure travel etc it's unacceptable furthermore coaches have been telling players that without this vaccination they will be sidelined and
045now we have gone from bribery to outright discrimination all it takes is for one student to have a deadly or severe reaction and the school will have a lawsuit on their hands as the pharmaceuticals have you sign a hold harmless agreement when you take the shot this is your responsibility chairman of the board mr bernstein and the boe this is not something that the superintendent should be communicating to our gps community you should not be coming between parents and children you should not be advising on private medical decisions you should not be bribing students to take this experimental shock you should not be discriminating against anyone for any reason gps is overstepping gps should be focusing on the curriculum as it relates to reading writing and math gps should be figuring out why half our
046students are failing and what they're going to do about it oh you didn't know well maybe that's where your energy is better spent and where your accountability lies that's it okay thank you all right our next speaker is michael d'angelo hi good evening um for the most part many of my concerns have already been addressed the one thing i would like to just put up here as something that should be discussed further and i would really appreciate this is i'm new to this forum um appreciate that parents be completely kept in the loop you know communication is really really key but just with specific mandate on masks in schools i really think this should start to be revisited because these hours and hours that our children are wearing masks constantly uh just does not seem
047to be supported by the science most egregious in this i feel is outdoor sports these kids are athletes they are forced to wear masks and i truly just don't believe this is at all healthy i won't take up a lot more time with this i just wanted to get it out there on the record thank you all right thank you very much and appreciate the uh brevity uh the next speaker is kara philbin and i got kara wrong i'm sorry i do not have a cara cara if you're with us if you wouldn't mind raising your hand okay we have somebody logged in as parent you are unmuted hi thank you um sorry i didn't realize you had to unmute me okay um can you can you please state your name just to make sure
048uh sure cara philbin thank you um good evening and thank you for the opportunity to speak i'm sorry but you just killed my all right thank you good evening and thank you for the opportunity to speak um as defined by the mother of four vaccinated children who has taken the time to attend meetings research and learn about the important issues and listen to hours of legislative committee testimonies cancel culture fact checking and censoring that is the act of censoring or silencing a person or organization close to the truth or censoring a board member for a hot mic moment while sitting on a offensive and inappropriate curriculum anti-vaxxer a well-read resourceful person who makes educated decisions based on research and personal experience on when and what to safely put in their body jab an experimental mrna
049gene therapy disguised as a vaccination greenwich public schools non-medical professionals who have not taken a medical oath and are pushing an experimental unapproved vaccine at times with misleading and inaccurate information facts these facts come from the vaccination fda documents there is no fda approved vaccine it is your choice to receive the coven 19 vaccine emergency use authorization is given when certain criteria are met including there are no adequate approved and available alternatives the coven 19 vaccines are unapproved vaccines that may i say may prevent coven 19 there is no fda approved vaccine to prevent coven 19. pfizer and biotech are new mrna technologies never used in vaccines before have the mrna covet vaccines been used before no both are still in clinical trials clinical trials if when you research them you'll learn we're done with
050healthy individuals moderna did is in the process of clinical trials 400 individuals 18 years of age and older have received at least one dose pfizer 000 individuals 16 years of age and older have received at least one dose what are the benefits of the mrna vaccines according to pfizer and moderna after stating that these vaccines are unapproved and may prevent 19 both toward the end of their respective fda documents state again that both are in ongoing clinical trials and then lie that pfizer has been shown to prevent coven 19 following two doses given three weeks apart both state that the duration and modernize saying that they're shown to prevent covet 19 both state that the duration of protection against coven 19 is currently unknown what are the risks they list the non-serious risks according to
051vares as of april 9th 2602 deaths 5074 hospitalizations 10 000. that's time thank you very much if you want you can email your comments to the board okay we're going to move on to our next speaker megan galetta megan if you could raise your hand makes it easy to find you thank you you are unmuted okay can you hear me yes please go ahead hi everyone um i'm megan gulletta um from riverside um you need any more information um thanks for having me speak tonight i'm the parent of four children ages 23 to 15 who have all gone through the greenwich public schools in the spirit of the letter that andrew gutman new york city parent of a breerly student we the parents of the greenwich community object to the following we object to mandating
052mass for our kids in school and in all activities there is an abundance of factual evidence from the medical community that have written about the negative health impacts of mass wearing not to mention what it is doing so what it is doing socially emotionally and mentally to our children we object to the greenwich public schools inserting their way in between parents and students this includes emailing the students directly without copying the parents and this has happened a few times this past year and we feel that it is unacceptable and it must be it must stop we object to the explicit and inappropriate content and curriculum being offered to our children it is completely unacceptable there are things that we've heard that i cannot even mouth the words of of or repeat or recall what has
053been shared with our kids and it's an atrocity and it must stop we object to the we demand that our kids be in school five days in person no excuses we have enough empty office buildings around this town that are completely empty and unused we challenge you to figure it out that is why we voted you all on the board and if you were all in a corporate america position you would be tasked to figure it out or you'd be shown the door we object to ma to be we object to mandating the coveted experimental gene therapy for for the students and this should not exclude them from attending in-person school any activities trips events in sports we accept expect that our curriculum not get watered down we expect that testing and assessments continue to
054be offered and that kids at all levels with all needs get the support they require board our families have nominated you to your positions these matters have nothing to do with politics so please do your utmost to keep politics out of our schools our curriculu and our curriculum and when making decisions in these next critical months as we plan for a full return we ask you that you keep politics out of all of the decisions has nothing to do with it it's not a left and it's not a right matter the number one objective should be to see our children thrive flourish in a healthy supporting and challenging environment this generation will be taking care and making decisions for all of us one day and i asked you to urge yourself i urge you to
055ask yourselves from where you sit right now can you confidently say that they are ready thank you all right thank you very much our next speaker is natalia d natalie if you could raise your hand that makes it go a little bit quicker okay i'm not seeing natalie signed in uh we'll go to our next speaker and we'll circle back uh sue vigilante you need to unmute please we've got you we just need you to unmute aaron i don't know what's going on i asked her to unmute as well so maybe it's um user error all right why don't we go to our next speaker and we'll circle back to uh to sue and hopefully that will work all right our next speaker is amy mouth i have unmuted and amy is this the correct
056speaker hi amy hello this is amy how are you good please go ahead we can hear you dr jones chairman emergency members of the board of ed thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak this evening and a big congratulations to all the distinguished teachers especially our beloved uh jen dunn at the end of the last bewe meeting some board members expressed the need to further explore why dr jones had administrators read white fertility last summer at the time i thought it was odd particularly in relation to the conversation about racism and discrimination in our schools and the need for greater diversity equity and inclusion curriculum i mean many corporations in this country and worldwide are attaching dei goals to performance appraisals are investing in cultural awareness and diversity training and are providing books
057like white fragility and cast to their employees and leaders in order to guide their management practices so i asked myself why is gps any different but as the month wore on there were even more things of concern the politics around how to fund the renovations at north mianis a school my fifth grader will likely never step foot in again then there was my family's own struggle to obtain an education from for my middle schooler largely around iep violations ppt drama including ignoring professional recommendations which caused me to think about what the gps litigation numbers really mean in relation to special ed as a parent i see how much money i have had to spend on legal fees for my child to receive four home bound instruction hours a week a violation of the 10 hour
058minimum and how gps strategically makes parents continue to fight regardless of the laws and regulations well we're often told during the boe meetings that we never know who's moving here in relation to outplacement numbers i wonder how this data is really examined do we look at how students and families could have been treated and provided services in a way that may not have required outplacement even more importantly what is the price for students losing time time they will never get back due to power struggles administrators bullying parents and broken ppt promises but i suppose that's the benefit of the boe having endless town council and here we come full circle this week with the article in wednesday's greenwich times strategically positioned under chauvin found guilty who decides the curriculum for town schools an article that
059again politicizes our education system i'm curious as to how other districts handle these same issues how do you ignore that we are living in a world where racism and discrimination exist how do we ignore the experience of all our students and staff why is this discussion political at all racism is part of our country's history past and present we should all be using critical thinking skills to examine the world around us how do we not teach our children to consider their own biases and assumptions when interacting with those around them it's irresponsible at best why wouldn't we want our children to be taught these skills in an environment that is supposed to be safe for learning by educators trained to teach who knows maybe our children could be educated enlightened and aware enough to not
060be part of the problem i am concerned that this current dialogue is distracting from the problems that our students and staff are really facing this dialogue is preventing meaningful change to occur and has allowed our most vulnerable population our children particularly those with special needs and differences to be left behind often bullied and discriminated against i implore the boe members to stay focused on the role of the boe as a policy driven board following the policies of state law please leave the politics out of our education thank you very much if you'd like to email your comments to the board please feel free to do so all right we're going to circle back for the people that we get earlier uh gary lesuskey gary if you're with us could you raise your hand all right
061i didn't see him on the list um natalie d i did not see natalie either i just wanted to come back and see all right and then let's try sue vigilante again i assume we had an issue with you being able to unmute so let's see if we can elevate them again um sue i don't know if you've signed in under a different name if you could raise your hand i think we're just having technical difficulties all right well hopefully the uh they can reach out to the board via email and that is the end of the uh speakers that signed up for public comment thank you very much everyone uh next up we're gonna move to our monthly report starting with the superintendent dr jones thank you mr bernstein just a couple of items
062tonight um first of all we have been practicing and getting ready for the ngss and just as a reminder for state assessments in connecticut we will be giving the ngss and s back this year and even our students who are fully remote will take those assessments from home so we were working on some kinks this week on how to do that for remote students and they held a session last night to help parents and know how to navigate that system i also just want to congratulate our distinguished teachers um and congratulations to all of them as well as tom healey on his announcement as middle school principal the year for the pta um i want to mention which i know p-tech did as well that there will be a community forum next thursday at 6
06330 uh hosted by p-tech and the league of women voters and this is to share information about our facilities master plan and how those priorities were set how the process uh worked how we plan for the budget um each year and how those are put together we also have a lot of end-of-the-year activities that are being planned right now so we ask um pta and all of our parents to stay patient for another week or two as we look at how we're going to do things like moving up ceremonies for fifth grade for sixth grade we are looking at being a little bit more open towards the end of the year than we were last year on things like field day and how can we do that um and still keep some of our mitigation
064strategies or keep our mitigation strategies in place um and i do just want to mention that on our call this week with the connecticut department of health their approach for school is different than what the governor did announce this week for business so as of may 19 most of the most of the business aspect is being completely opened up the connecticut department of health is telling us that we should stick with our mitigation strategies in our school that they have worked for the school year and that it's important that we continue that and we'll continue to take guidance from connecticut department health local department of health head of nursing and our doctor consultant but um i just want to share there's a little bit of um not going to say a disagreement but the approach
065for school and the approach for business right now is very different and that's all i have for tonight thank you all right thank you dr jones all right next up is reports of oh karen kowalski with your hand up yeah hi peter i just i wanted to just have um this opportunity to ask talk to a couple of things that were mentioned in comments that um with and address them with um with dr jones so dr jones and i've seen the emails too but why is the administration sending out emails encouraging the vaccination of students so i i think it's through the lens of the holder um i don't feel like we're coming from a lens of trying to convince anybody to do anything we're putting out the information for the families and i do
066think we have an obligation to do that even from the state of connecticut um you know even in the alliance districts they were hosting uh the clinics specifically for schools and there is an expectation that you know schools are going to put the information out there and ultimately it's the family choice families have to decide what's right for their child and their family so putting aside whether or not we agree that there's an obligation why is it going directly to the students if you if there's an expectation that information should be shared uh with our gps community why is it going to the to the students why isn't it not just going to the parents it went to the parents and it went to the students because our students who are 18 and seniors may
067have a different decision personally than their parents want them and um if they're 18 that's that's a decision that the family has to work out again with the students and i will say student government had asked this school year that we do email students because a lot of the parents may not read their emails they may not know what's happening and so i have occasionally this school year not very often i think we've probably sent probably three maybe just to put general information out so that the students feel well informed and again that came from student government and it was their request yeah i understand i i understand the general information regarding you know what with specifics for schools and what schedules on and cohorts and obviously what's going on in school activities but i
068challenged the fact that there was a request to disseminate medical information and medical advice or recommendations to to children directly and i think that the administration i think i'm not done yet i think the administration should be very careful in what type of information is shared is is given to children with respect to vaccinations and medical issues that is a personal that is a family issue that is there between the parent and the family and i don't think it is the appropriate at all for the administration to be stepping into that conversation in any respect um this it's not required i i'd like to know what the obligation is because certainly it's not required by the state or the federal government to get the vaccination so there is plenty of tv commercials and radio commercials
069all out there on with respect to the vaccination and it's out there i do not think it is the administration's role or obligation to step into and in between families regarding whether or not a child should receive a vaccination i think it's highly inappropriate and i respect that that's your opinion but again it is a family decision 16 and 17 year olds cannot get vaccinated without their parents signing consent it is so it ultimately is the parents decision and what we have put out were all of the links from the cdc from the connecticut department of health people can read as much as they want and they take the information but we are not we've made it very clear it's a family choice but they're not going to advertise for instance the clinic that they
070uh put together just for greenwich high school so that our students could register if they wanted to a little bit easier we have to push that information out our students and families would not know how do you know that because we get the information from actual brunswick and greenwich hospital and that was set up specifically for greenwich public schools and so that's that's how we communicate with our families and is via email and again there's not it's not an opinion it's giving families and students information for them to make that decision as a family look i would have i would agree that's yeah i think i would swap it back and forth it really is inappropriate to be addressed in the comments that were made earlier i would suggest you and dr jones take the
071conversation offline all right next up mr cher yeah uh tony i i didn't know i was going to speak on this but i got a little more concerned the more i just heard can you just give me give me a a couple clarifications i didn't understand what you were saying when you were saying we have an obligation to disseminate information could could you just i mean i've got a couple follow-up questions i'm just trying to get clear here what your thinking was in in in doing this so before this one lengthy back and forth um i would just advise that board members should be taking these conversations offline with dr jones you know peter i i respectfully disagree if this is a public meeting this is when we operate as a board and this is
072when the public says i'm not going to go do these conversations that you want to have the conversation for the public well she's look she's here to present her you should be asking for that offline and not wait for a meeting to do that okay um tony can you just elaborate on this when you say these uh obligations inseminate i'm a little bit um i don't understand that when we get information from the connecticut department of health cdc any of those organizations we have all year long about covet information push that out and it's not to push out information to have an opinion one way or the other it's to help parents and families be informed be well informed and that's it okay so so there's no there's no i'm not sorry when you said
073obligation it's just that i got it it's a decision that you've made okay the other thing i didn't understand is when you said to we have seniors over 18 yes i know we have seniors over 18 they're adults in our school system why did we then send it to people who are 18 and under why did we do that well as i said before we sent it to the high school students so that they would know if they're 16 or 17 what's actually happening what the information is to help them be educated as well and again our young people had asked for us um to communicate more with them and i think you heard one of the students actually reference it in their comment tonight um it's just having the information so that they can
074be well informed and have conversations with their parents and also sending it to the families and and tony i i read the communication that my daughter got and look i i'm vaccinated so and my wife is vaccinated and other people are vaccinated in my home and i know there are people who feel very strongly that this vaccine these so-called vaccines are you know everybody's making their own decisions that's you know i don't want to get in a debate about vaccines um what i'm what i'm a little bit confused by is um i was going to ask you separately about the communication where it said that the vaccines are fda approved and they're not so um but i i was wondering if uh and then somebody brought it up so i wasn't gonna bring it up
075until it was brought up here you realize there's a difference between those two things right being fda approved and having an emergency youth authorization yes mr sure yes i do understand the difference okay and we have put out all of the links and the information for anybody that wants to read all of that information from the connecticut department of health from the cdc it is all there and um there's the the very first communication had several links so if you went and you clicked on all of those you could find out all the type of information but no i i read the note i read the note with your signature ralph's signature on the nurse's signature and i noticed that right away that it had a misstatement in it and you know it's misstatements happen
076i was just wondering i just wanted to get clear on where you were with this and if you maybe recognize that as something that should not be communicated in the future my last question is tony is [Music] based upon these kind of questions and feedback what's your intent are you you will you continue to send things directly to students or would you going forward um modify your practice and not do that i think you're specifically asking about the vaccine and i think we've passed that point in time uh the clinic has come and gone and it's just going to be a matter of families now signing up if they want to sign up we're not going to have any more of those but as far as emailing students just general information i think i would
077honor that request by our high school students and absolutely if it's information just could be end of year activities it could be anything so i guess i don't have a problem with that tony i just my feedback to you would be i this is about medicine this is about a medical decision and i'm i'm i'll just say it i'm a little troubled that i'm i'm not hearing um recognition of that that that's something different we're not talking about after-school activities and we're not talking about end-of-year things i mean this is this is pretty i mean i hate to say it but i mean we're here the school system the school system inserted itself between students and parents and i just don't think that was a good idea it was unwise and i i just wish
078somebody would say hey we recognize that as wise we've learned from this we're not going to do that again and i i guess i'm i'm i'm not i'm not hearing that and um [Music] i'm hearing you say and i want to be fair to you i'm hearing you say this is a difference of opinion and your opinion is we should be doing this and i just i'm i'm i'm i'll say it i'm really troubled by that because i don't think you asked me long ago why superintendents don't last in greenwich and hold on this is inappropriate at this point well and i think we've left this going on long enough so i'm going to call on the next speaker mr um so tony i was lucky enough to be with the uh students at the
079um at the ex-con meeting the high school students and first of all all the emails i've read you've been very clear this is a family choice i'm only halfway through my vaccination because i'd like to point out to people that i'm so young that i was in that group of people that couldn't get vaccinated to the last group um but uh i know that a lot of the kids were asking for that at that meeting so but you've been very clear in all the emails i've read that it's family choice and it is um but more importantly what they raised in that meeting and that they mentioned tonight that i wanted to ask you about to see if you've thought about it all is the seniors coming back together for at least a week um
080can you talk a little bit about that is that a dream is that possible i just think that would be amazing for these kids um we i am working on that right now but not necessarily where the other students would have to stay home but bringing seniors back because right now in a senior class of 700 we're only talking about 350 students that are at home so that's where we are as of today and we're trying to also couple some of the return with a testing type program um at the high school optional parents would have to you know sign but just to help people feel that much safer about returning so i'm working on that right now okay that that would be a wonderful thing to sort of finish out those kids years all
081right thank you all right mr kelly well i'm going to go go back to the vaccine topic because it does seem a little controversial but my questions are a little more procedural the uh uh the state aren't they providing us any guidance on how to communicate with our families because we're not the only school district uh that is uh going through this where we have to communicate with our students and parents are regarding vaccines it's it's we're on unique times uh this has never happened before so we have to figure out how to navigate it going forward and i'm sure we're not going to do everything right but certainly i would ask that are we hedging our decisions by making sure that other districts and the state is guiding us in this way tony the
082state actually does send us the information that's where almost everything that we send out comes from the connecticut department of health that's why you know i even wanted to point out tonight that their viewpoint on mitigation strategies is very different than what the governor announced this week and we you know lean on them for how we communicate what we communicate um trying to be as accurate as possible and i will say you know i have i've had as many emails um sent or strongly so that believe the immunization should be mandatory it is a very controversial topic um and i just tried to reiterate each family must approach it from what they believe is best for their family well it's obviously uh sensitive to many and i could feel their pain and certainly want to
083make sure that we're getting further information just other than making the decisions ourselves and if we are then we're going to make that statement that we're making it ourselves so basically if we're going to the state discussing with them talking to other districts trying to figure out how they're communicating uh with their students uh and their and their parents and their families certainly we want to remain consistent with that and if we feel it's wrong what the other group is doing certainly we need to talk about that so i agree uh some of the things that mentioned i know we're not supposed to reference those things but i kind of feel it it's topic now uh certainly we want to put a stop to any coaches uh that were mentioned that are uh are putting
084pressure on any student to do something that their family is deciding is not the right thing to do or or any teacher or anybody so uh uh certainly we'll we'll check through i would suggest we check through the ranks to make sure uh the families are not being misinformed uh by members of the staff and that they're uh they're reminded that these things are optional and uh these things are are decisions made by guidance given to us by a uh by a higher authority thank you yes we will absolutely um address that with the director of athletics um that's i took that note down as well thank you miss kwalski i'm gonna skip over you because there's people who haven't spoken yet miss hersh sorry peter i didn't actually mean to raise my hand i
085got trigger trigger happy no worries miss hersh i'm sorry i uh most of you know i think actually uh mr kelly uh spoke to pretty much what i was going to uh to say about getting uh guidance from the state on this um i i know that we have received a lot i'm you know the representative for uh the board rep or liaison on ces i know that they've been sharing a lot of this information within all of their districts as well as the other um reps on that committee have shared with us as well and i was just gonna say our job uh as a public school district is to share educational information and educate people and um at least the emails that i've received uh in regards to this as a high school
086parent have all uh provided uh educational information and it's all specifically stated that it is a personal choice but um we are offering the opportunity for students who may not otherwise have an opportunity uh should they want should they or their families want to get these um and uh it is a personal choice certainly and and i think that's been made very clear in every email that i've received or my students have received um and i just wanted to uh to thank dr jones for just at least uh making sure to educate others um and sharing all the educational links all right and just before we we move on i just want to note i don't think i've seen any evidence that coaches have said this so obviously you're going to look into it which
087i think is the right course but as of right now you know it's just a rumor so we'll wait to hear back from you on that dr jones all right miss olsen um yeah i'll be brief as well i just want to say um you know thank you because i i appreciate it dr jones that you and your team have sent out ample information to families and it has been very clear that you know it's a family decision um and you know with this i do think that uh you know more information accurate information is better and and you've provided that to families so appreciate that and thank you all right thank you very much we're going to move on now to our reports of officers committees and liaisons if there's anybody that's got a
088report please raise your hand give you guys a moment all right mr kelly oh thank you let's talk first about the uh cardinal stadium we're having some great progress today we had a bunch of cement mixers uh driving into the site today pouring lots and lots of concrete into those footings uh that will someday in the very near future hold up those bleachers and hopefully last 70 years as the other bleachers have lasted they're pouring a whole lot of concrete deep holes things are working positively on the stadium side of things uh we have a bit of a hiccup up on the uh the ada parking uh we ran into a bit of a challenge with the tree warden we have some trees uh that we tried very hard to uh navigate around during during
089the design stage of the drainage and the uh and the parking lot uh and uh there were some trees that kind of that the tree warden wants us to address preserve uh we offered to possibly exchange other new trees for those trees we have a hearing on may 12th at one o'clock for all those interested in supporting the project we'll get to get to discuss things with the tree warden and uh and the people who are uh in support of those specific trees and how we've tried to navigate and uh design around those uh but we'll have a discussion then if anybody would like to join and support our project on uh may 12th uh we'll put out or contact me and i'll give you how you could participate in that uh tree warden hearing
090uh also we had uh uh some uh some nice uh discussions as usual with cara uh with carol sutton on the negotiation committee uh about how we can work together with our our teachers and our unions and it's always nice to have a a casual conversation with carol she's a she's been very nice and opened about about just uh just things in general uh we a suggestion on a committee uh whether it's the appropriate time uh not to speak of it i'm just gonna touch on it uh we have the hillside waterfall the waterfall in the corner of uh of the uh high school property uh there's a committee being i guess informally structured uh supported by the hillside neighborhood association uh by the greenwich uh sustainability committee of supporting it greenwich historical society the
091tree conservatory the greenwich green and clean uh the greenwich green escape committee all would like to support somehow beautifying and bringing it to uh to attention to our community this this wonderful feature we have hidden by overgrowth uh in the corner of the high school uh this is a project in the and we have ashley cole who's helping us run this project and uh the intentions are have this uh project funded by outside uh funds uh not to be paid for by uh uh by the town but collect outside funds in order to make that uh that waterfall nice and hopefully we can work together with the town as well and create a committee that could possibly do that uh so uh we'll talk further on that i just wanted to announce that tonight that
092we're working on organizing something like that well back to the stadium for a second a few of the board members have visited the site and i hope everybody enjoyed their visit seeing the progress of a cardinal stadium thank you very much all right thank you uh miss downey since we're talking about the high school i'm going to report in on the high school entryway we've um put out an rfp for architects the committee is going to be meeting tomorrow and again i think in a week or so and we anticipate i believe having an architect for selection which we will present to the board i believe at the may board meeting um and then once the architect will be able to go forward with the project okay make note of that entryway in may meeting
093thank you all right miss olsen yes um so dtac obviously met this week and congratulations it's already been said multiple times but congratulations to um to our distinguished teachers um and also and just thank you to kathy brunetti and the whole committee and um all the all the work they they've done with it um also thank you tom healy um that's separated apart from dtac but um he's phenomenal absolutely deserves that award um uh grants alliance met this week also um continuing to do great work um continuing to celebrate avid success um for those who i think i mentioned before avid students what it does is it helps ava students in high school and college receive help with professional skill building mentoring coaching and good money habits um also greenwich alliance is in the process
094of uh reviewing all the the reaching out grants that have been submitted um which are an amazing way for you know educators and thank you to the educators that that did put in for grants um because they you know they're a little lengthy to fill out but but well worth it and benefit our educators and ultimately um the students um uh one last thing tuning into music is is is finishing up end of april um it's been a huge success with one-on-one music lessons for for 63 students who skype um who would have not otherwise had music had music at this time so um thank you to the greenwich alliance for all they do and continue to do thank you and just a quick chair update on two things uh one while we will be
095back live uh in person at our main meeting we still plan on remote streaming probably continue to use zoom and obviously if there are board members or administrators that are not feeling comfortable attending in person it's a personal choice next just to let board members know we likely will have to schedule a special meeting from north myans once we have more information about the project cost uh the bet allocated money for the front end work that's already been happening which is the removal of the uh of the the affected areas uh and we will have to be going back for a request for the actual repairs uh and then dr jones will uh will let us know if there's a plan hatch for uh where the students will reside once the work uh starts so
096we'll probably take that up at some point in the future so just watch for an email on that once we have a better sense of the timing with that we're going to move on to our first discussion item which is the ap european history textbook and i'm going to turn it over to dr carabello well thank you very much and welcome uh thank you for having us this evening lucy arreco will with her team will be presenting why they chose this particular new textbook for the ap european history course thank you ann good evening everyone i'm lucia reco i'm the bella house administrator and the social studies program administrator with me tonight are two of our amazing social studies teachers ian tiedemann and alyssa stack um both of them teach our ap uh european history
097course and have reviewed um a few books for consideration and we're here to uh recommend that you adopt um the uh the book uh titled the history of western society since 1300 um a book that we've been referring to uh mckay uh for sure um i think uh alyssa was going to talk a little for a little bit first about uh last spring and um you know how we came to think about uh looking at some of the books and then um ian was going to uh talk about how the books compare hi buddy go ahead alyssa alyssa stack i've been teaching this class for over 15 years and when i first started teaching it 15 years ago the textbooks that we used were um not brand new so in those 15 years plus they
098have been well loved well worn and it was time to look into some new options given the way that textbook usage has been going in the past couple of years and particularly last spring with the distance learning environment we decided that we really did need to take a look at some online textbooks and we researched a whole bunch i'm going to let ian tiemann talk about that process and how it was that we finally settled on the mckay textbook uh thanks alyssa thanks lucy good evening everybody um so yeah we went through the process of looking at all of the different the different books can you hear me okay okay great okay we went through the process of looking at all the different books that meant looking at their readability first um and they're all
099about they're all about equal um the ones that we were using versus the the ones that we the one that we've put forward um but what i think really differentiated the one that we put forward the mckay textbook um was first like we're looking at a different type of thing it's not just like a book that we're giving students anymore it's a full digital platform and so amongst that digital platform we have to look at the ease of use and navigation the textbook tools that kids have like the highlighting tools the note card tools and then of course the quality of the learning resources included with it that includes the different homework practice sets and also the mckay book includes an entire entire secondary book which is full of primary documents for students to use
100as well as other resources that support teachers in planning lessons again the mckay book had the easiest navigation tools easiest one to look at it also had the highest quality learning resources that we felt for the students so that's why we ended up putting this book forward all right any uh any discussion all right mr share with fasthand go ahead karen i'll go next oh peter was up first i know i took it down okay karen go ahead um i was gonna say you know i i you know being on the uh uh curriculum council and having reviewed other textbooks at least this year with math um you know i know ap curriculums and materials are handled slightly differently how often do you think that they tend to reviews review and revise their curriculum and
101how often does that tend to necessitate needing a new textbook do you know you know well um alyssa you've been teaching europe longer than me um uh how many times have they actually reviewed the ap euro when was the last time that they revised the curriculum so i started teaching the class in 2004 and um since then they have gone through one massive curriculum review when they changed curriculum focus and also the structure of the test i will say before and after that curriculum review we continue to use the palmer textbook and the kagan textbook those are two um you know outstanding textbooks in the field and there wasn't a need to change the textbook because there wasn't there weren't any supplementary materials that were directly aligned with the ap curriculum now there are supplementary
102materials aligned with the ap curriculum but because it is an online platform um i think we'd have to go back to the publisher but i imagine that in order to stay current the publisher would have to reissue their ap materials if the curriculum ever changed again but like i said it's only changed once in the past uh 17 years and that was to better align with what college professors were saying students needed to know in terms of skills going into college not in terms of the course overview it has always been the renaissance to the present um as long as i've been teaching the class um sorry another other thing that another thing that we notice is that the books themselves have also been kind of overhauled and even some simplification of the order of
103the chapters so the ones that we were using versus the one that we're putting forward has actually streamlined things into um a much more much easier to navigate book itself oh so the other question i was going to ask um is you know i know you mentioned um all the supplementary materials for students and teachers and making it easier for less lesson planning um you know is there any support for students i know especially this past year uh college board was trying to put together materials to help students uh have have added uh materials for at home um does this textbook include some additional materials and work for students i didn't hear those last few words you said i didn't know if this textbook uh and the online component also included any materials for students
104to be able to go back through a lesson at home or any other materials supplemental materials for them specifically i mean i thought that had some but yes um it has the ability that for students to actually create their own flash cards as they as they write and save them has the ability for students to keep their own digital highlights and notes in the margins it also has the secondary source reader i mentioned um it has embedded practice questions and when the students actually read each of the homework assignments has an adaptive multiple choice test that they have to do and as they are doing those questions they're able to go back to the text to get hints about and and it holds them accountable for reading and supports their reading with those with those
105tests and for the teacher resources themselves those are things that we can then directly use or not use depending on how we how we how we select that material with the students thank you let me see if we want to talk about the college board and their um advisement to you and anybody else who teaches ap courses i can say that i had to um renew my certification to teach the ap course this year every i think it's every five years a teacher has to put forward a syllabus to be granted um you know certification by the ap board to teach the course and when i put together my syllabus this year i indicated this mckay textbook and um our syllabus was approved my syllabus was approved for this particular textbook okay miss downey um
106two super quick questions about how many students a year take ap euro i'm just kind of curious that's a curiosity and then i'll have a different question so oh go ahead lucy um in in recent years we have roughly 50 students [Music] great and just i want to ask dr jones in terms of the cost of this new textbook is it covered in the budget that we voted on or what's the impact of this just to know that's more of the dr carabillo question yes it is covered in our current budget moving forward great thank you mr chair peter mute hi uh lucy ian and alyssa it's nice to talk with you guys again um alyssa i was just actually trying to text uh audrey to ask her thoughts about this textbook because you did
107marvelous job teaching her this course um i had a just a couple questions just a confirmation um [Music] this word this seems to be really straightforward if i'm not wrong and correct me if i'm wrong because the college board sets the curriculum it's not something set by greenwich public schools and the textbook manufacturers are just there's enough of a market for it so they just aligned completely the materials right so i i saw your i read your uh the write-up that you sent to the board about this um and i gleaned out of it what ian was talking about which is um you know you were really making the selection based upon supplemental tools the fact that it's online etc etc was there anything in the content between the three books you looked at that
108was different or is it really not very different because the um the the curriculum is so tightly prescribed and so tightly aligned obviously to the you know this on some level is unfortunately teaching to the test as much as you guys don't teach to the test which thank you very much for doing that i realize that's the reality related to this area is there anything in the content that's different between the three you considered well not really we actually considered four books um oh i'm sorry i thought i saw three on that list thank you for the correction four we actually considered four three of them kagan mckay and spielvogel are pretty similar they have a similar textbook look and feel palmer is very is very different it has its own kind of like very
109different writing style okay and yeah so in choosing one textbook we went with the one that was like a more traditional textbook with a visual format that then with with review questions and and and some of the ap curriculums language um that we went that direction and then we chose the one that that we felt most comfortable with overall yeah um two two other or one question and then one asked um just just our curiosity when did this go through the uh curriculum committee the district's curriculum committee this must have gone through a while ago right it was an assessment because i saw the rubric and the rest of it people who scored it who who scored it who was on the committee that selected this thing i'm sure went through the curriculum committee at
110some point right so it was uh we had textbook samples that we sent to uh various parents and students it was not um a specific designated okay okay don't worry it's not a problem lucy i realize i i can see the look on your face from that question don't worry about it it's something we're going to talk about as a board in a in a few minutes um the other question is uh how can i maybe other board members are interested before we take up the vote is there available can you make available to us or i'm interested in taking a look at the book you're proposing is there a online copy or something can you guys figure that out so we can look at it i i don't know about an online copy i
111know or if you have a hard copy that's okay too yes i contacted our rep because um you know i wanted to have the ease of paper if necessary um and she was willing to send out um a hard copy so um i'm sure if we contacted her again and asked to you know have a hard copy provided that would be yeah or if you guys have one and you want us you know if somebody wants to see it and they need to come by the high school or whatever you guys figure out i don't want to make it hard i would like to be able to look at it okay great well thank you for the information and thank you for your detailed report you're welcome i i was going to make a joke
112about how much his european history changed but i'm not going to do that um but i i do think the board has a limited role in the ap courses because of the uh the mandate from from the folks at the college board so i'm sure there's information that can be shared with us on that um mr kelly hello my question's a little broad and maybe uh uh just curious about the uh uh the training uh whether the supplier uh offers a degree of training maybe confirm or elaborate on how uh the staff the teachers will be trained on how to uh how to uh present this uh this this new textbook uh or the uh the district supplies training for this how how do we envision the training to uh to be describe that a
113little bit to me please uh well we we learned to use it this year actually because we had the approval to do a trial run with the book um coming into this year given the the the 25 plus year old condition of the previous textbooks one uh mr bernstein was rushed to press right after the soviet union collapsed so um yeah so it was time it was time for a new book and given the issue with getting books back after um covid uh coveted lockdown you know we figured look these books are they can't get damaged they can't get lost they can't get germed up and anyway so we we went through the different publishers and we were ready to kind of you know use the other books again uh this year with the difficulties
114of distributing them and then recollecting them but this publisher actually offered us a completely free trial run this year and we've learned it you know as you learn to use anything through trial and error but they've been very helpful um being willing to offer us you know tutorials whenever we had questions and we emailed them and and the customer service rep worked with us whenever we had it but mostly the best way to learn to use anything is to is to just use it thank you all right so this is a uh a first time uh we will take this up for approve what our main meeting obviously if you can get access for the board to take a peek or if you get a hard copy just uh dr john can let us know
115how to view that that would be great all right thank you very much thank you we will move on to our next uh discussion item which is curriculum implementation so dr carabillo and mr d'amico so thank you mr d'amico and i before we begin would like to congratulate congratulate our six distinguished teachers and mr healey for his connecticut pta award of middle school principal of the year so if you can put up the thank you very much so we are going to hopefully answer the questions that we have on the next slide what is the gps process for developing curricula where is the curriculum located for teacher access which board policies guide curricular development who monitors the safe and successful implementation of curriculum and what curricular resources are available for parents next slide so all
116of our curriculum work is guided and anchored in various board policies tonight we'll be highlighting three of the policies that guard i work they are policy 6140 curriculum and you can read what that is policy about equipment books and materials provision and selection and policy 6180 the evaluation of the instructional program there are various additional policies that address aspects of the curriculum policy 6-1-20 objectives and priorities of the instructional program 6121 non-discrimination of the instructional program policy 6141 curriculum design and development policy 6142 basic instructional program policy 6146 grading assessment systems weighted grades and policy 6161 equipment books materials and provision selection next slide before we dive in i think it's important that we review some of the terminology we'll be using tonight first everything we teach is grounded in standards the written statements that
117outline specific skills and concepts that students must master by the end of the school year in each subject area and grade from the standards we create our curriculum which is the what we teach and when or in which order we teach things mike you can go ahead and click the instruction is the how we teach the curriculum in the greenwich public schools we ground our curriculum in the understanding by design framework and our instruction is based on the gradual release of responsibility framework the final term here is lesson plans which are the day-to-day hour-to-hour plans teachers create in response to and in alignment with gps curriculum and instruction documents at the bottom of the slide you will note a reference to our management plan which outlines our schedule for writing and updating our various curricula
118next slide i thought it would be helpful just to have a snapshot of what you will find on the state department of education website the state has provided a one-stop shop for accessing all educational standards that have been adopted by the state board of education once adopted they are in statute to be used to design local curricula by law you have to design local curricula for teachers and students to access next slide this year the curriculum committee was comprised of two board of ed members mr d'amico and myself our sole focus was to look for a textbook series for k-8 math that was aligned with our connecticut state standards based on the common core state standards with resource materials that would give us opportunities to meet the needs of every student and to assure all
119students are taught the guaranteed curriculum this summer we will be revising our curriculum to be in alignment with the grade level standards to match the linear progression of our new materials and resources and we are hoping that you will be approving our request for our new text big ideas as you can see we currently approach our committee a little differently and you just heard the difference that we have our annual review cycle is designed to re-engage and support all of our diverse learners which continues the makeup of our district curriculum committee used to be a group of teachers parents and administrators who met i believe monthly to discuss all different topics topics content uh materials uh applications and to really see what was going on throughout the district but what we found was that we
120were not able to really be specific about each content area and really dig into what needed to be done so we decided to change it for this year but the changes that we had last year and this year with mr d'amico and myself it's given us an opportunity to really review what we have done so this is our new way of starting to have everything be consistent and have a process that is followed throughout the district for k-12 curriculum development next slide on this slide you're going to see an example of how we vet and select primary curriculum resources such as the new k-8 math textbook first a determination is made that there's a need for a new or updated resource second the program coordinator develops a budget that will cover the anticipated expenses associated
121with the purchase of the new materials professional development that needs to take place and to pay the committee members for their time in vetting the options third a review committee is formed comprised of teachers administrators board of ed liaisons and parents fourth committee reviews the various programs and provide feedback using a district approved rubric that checks for alignment to current research on both content and instructional practices next the committee solicits even more feedback and finally and it's the stage we're at this evening the committee sends its final recommendation to the superintendent who then presents the final textbook recommendation to the board for approval next slide the role of curriculum is to provide the district with a road map to what is taught through a district written curriculum that provides intentional alignment between standards instruction and
122assessment curriculum alignment is an agreement of what is written taught and assessed it is expected that all central administration building administrators and teachers be committed to the implementation of the standards-based written curriculum to support increased student learning and student success the written curriculum is def defined by non-negotiable standards objectives and expectations that students are to achieve while in school within a given year as mr d'amico said the written curriculum is developed utilizing the understanding by design framework and is aligned to the connecticut's core standards state frameworks and approved national standards the written curriculum is the framework that supports the development of the taught curriculum the board of education officially approves the course objectives lined in a content specific curriculum the taught refers to instruction the process by which teachers develop units of study lesson plans
123and approaches to instruction utilizing the district identified strategies and models utilizing the written curriculum the main goal of the taught curriculum is to engage students in a rigorous standards-based curriculum curriculum that provides multiple and varied opportunities for students to achieve the tenants of the vision of the graduate the assessed curriculum is the testing of the talk curriculum it is used to measure success and impact of the curriculum and student mastery of the standards it measures how well students learn the taught curriculum so on this slide you see a summary of the changes that we made for this year that it gave us an opportunity to examine our process and see what worked and what needed those improvements we learned from our past that even though teachers did a lot of work during the summer that
124one week they were not able to complete all the revisions and were not able to completely enter the revised curriculum or the resources into schoology the curriculum work will be paced throughout the year in the in the future and during the summer as needed and it will be led by our coordinators so our future goals are here so you can see what we are working on now update and revise curricular units across all disciplines k-12 expectations will be followed and we want to create exemplar lesson examples to illustrate how digital tools and resources can be integrated within the curriculum next slide the purpose of this slide is to share with the board of education and the public that's listening in tonight that teachers have access to all district created curriculum and materials we have made
125a commitment to utilize a common district template in all content areas k through eight the reason behind this decision is to guarantee consistency and to provide high quality instructional materials next slide new this year the pacing for all elementary core subject areas have been placed into one easy to read document since the k5 teachers teach it all what you see here is a snippet of the kindergarten pacing guide but all k5 pacing guides are now structured this way next slide mike you can click on thank you here you see an example of the curriculum and instruction documents that teachers have access to the first excerpt shows a unit outline for the kindergarten humanities unit my communities and mate the next excerpt shows how the teacher can implement the unit in his or her classroom hyperlinks
126to teaching and learning documents and resources are included throughout this portion of the curriculum you will notice that teachers are provided some choice in which resources they use to ensure all students needs and interests are met however teachers are expected to teach this unit in alignment with the standards and skills outlined in each dimension next slide on this slide you see how we monitor curriculum implementation our administrators are responsible for assuring the greenwich guaranteed curriculum is being implemented by our greenwich teachers during our distance learning experiences as well as in person learning administrators have visited classrooms to observe teachers and give constructive feedback to them last year and this year the state department of education waived the summative evaluation of all teachers and administrators teachers will receive feedback this year from their evaluators but will
127not be rated this year for the second year in a row next slide please this is the new tuple rubric that we finally completed this year and you will be getting it presented to you in june we will be presenting the final revised double rubrics to you and this is the domain that addresses the teacher's plan for implementing the guaranteed greenwich curriculum addressing the standards and engaging their students in inquiry and learning teachers are encouraged to use flexibility and created creativity in determining the how of teaching the instruction not the what of teaching the curriculum expectations are outlined in district maps teachers plan instruction with district supported frameworks such as the workshop instructional model inquiry and the tuple indicators before a formal observation a conference is held between the administrator and the teacher to learn
128about the students in the class what is going to be taught determine where in this open sequence the lesson flaw falls and the differentiation the differentiation and tasks are well organized and how will the teacher know the students are meeting the learning targets do the results of student assessments show that teachers are following the gps written curriculum and that's what we look for next slide the parent curriculum guides this is an example of all of the k-5 curriculum guides for parents that are on our district web page so if you click on teaching and learning on the welcome page and then on the district curriculum on the district website you will find them these are not complete yet but it is work that will continue to be completed over the next year and uploaded so
129we can continue to be partners in learning with our families so let's review what is the process for developing curriculum the curriculum manage plan management plan maps out content grades and work to be done i am currently working with the greenwich public greenwich high school administrators to develop a 912 curriculum map so all content and grade levels are consistent with the process of developing and revising curricula teachers and administrators and sometimes consultants work together to analyze the curriculum to determine if units need to be redesigned evaluate textbooks and resources and develop foundational lessons develop scope and sequence documents pacing charts and design assessments number two where is the curriculum treated located for teacher access originally it was in the aspen curriculum mapper some of the curriculum was migrated to schoology and google drive currently we
130are identifying the best location to centralize all curriculum but in the meantime all curricula will be in schoology number three which board policies guide curricula development policy 6140 guides curriculum policy 6161 guides equipment and materials selection and policy 6180 guides the evaluation of the instructional program who monitors the safe and successful implementation of curriculum building administrators service primary evaluators and monitor curriculum implementation by conducting formal and informal observations and walk-throughs to evaluate how closely a lesson's learning targets are aligned to district curriculum coordinators and program administrators serve as contributing evaluators to teacher observation as well number five what curricular resources are available for parents currently the k-5 parent curriculum guides in multiple disciplines are located in the district curriculum page on the gps website we are working towards completion of the k-8 parent curriculum guides
131and that is our presentation and if we are welcome to answer questions that you may have mr honey christina you're gonna mute me yes you yeah it's just a little trouble hearing yeah that's okay and the screen sharing is still going on um i just wanted to let um our board our fellow board members know that when we saw this matter um on the agenda policy governance met um and reviewed um these policies relating to curriculum we actually had a few extra in addition um to what ms carabello had we kind of went through all the cave related policies that we've adopted just to be sure we felt they were comprehensive and we also looked to see we didn't see that we're missing any cabe recommended policies on curriculum there's a couple of procedures that'll
132come up in the course of retirement um as we'll talk about later uh relating to those but those will be implemented ultimately as regulations by dr jones but i just wanted to kind of let people know that we had taken a look at this from a policy point of view thank you other discussion ms kowalski so christina just following up you said you had you looked at policies there are other policies which ones are those and then what was the discussion well we basically just reviewed um there was i think i'm just thinking if i i yeah we also looked at 61 41 326 you know kind of we looked at all the ones that dr carabello cited plus a couple more plus we were looking at procedures and also some of them tied into
133this retirement of procedures that we are tasked that we are doing so we just looked at all of those as a comprehensive picture to feel that the policies were in place um that covered the things they needed to cover we looked at the cave manual we didn't see that we were lacking any um because we also are looking at things that cabe has some not on this issue but um recommended policies that we'll ultimately be bringing before the board if we decide they're warranted and then we did look at these from a procedural point of view because there are all these procedures um in in the old e series that link to these and some of them need to become regulations that accompany these new numbered policies does that make sense yeah yeah and and
134i appreciate if you don't have it in front of you and and we don't need to take up board time for it but i'm sure you have a comprehensive list and maybe it's in your meeting minutes of all the policies and procedures that you looked at i'd just be curious to see which ones that you looked at to make sure that we were we had um comprehensive policy in place that'd be great i appreciate it yeah um so the i guess going into the the process it look overall and i appreciate mark and and the the presentation because it it outlines a very comprehensive and thoughtful approach to how curriculum is reviewed approved and is put forward before the teachers so here's the elephant in the room and the question i have so if we
135have this process in place um and and given one of the comments earlier from one of our parents uh saying it was a hundred percent that tony had said it was 100 legal to show that video so how do we prevent something like that happening again we have this these curriculum guidelines we have a process it's thorough our policy committee has reviewed it saying we have all the right policies in place so how do we prevent um you know pornography being shown to second graders mark before you go dr jones did you want to address that comment since it was made about you yeah absolutely we do not support the use of a video of that nature whatsoever um what does happen within curriculum and implementation um is is teachers do pull in additional resources
136and there is an expectation um that they are going to use good professional judgment when they pull in those resources um but absolutely we don't we do not support the use of that video uh in our classroom at all no and i understand that i mean that's that's the natural response to it and that's the one that everyone expects to hear but it it it was shown and it was and so that's why i had previously asked about this was in a social emotional learning segment and if we have curriculum for which the parent the teachers can pull from that have approved materials why wouldn't those have been utilized the only thing that i can put that off to is that again we're dealing with people and we're dealing with humans and we have over
137a thousand teachers we don't have these incidents happen every day um and a teacher has to have good professional judgment about the materials that they share with children in developmentally being appropriate for the age and it should match the standard of the content that they're teaching to yeah but we've had i mean putting aside this particular issue we may not have them every day but we've sure had them a lot lately and the second grade incident isn't the only one there was an incident at least one at western middle school on three different occasions a 10th grade class was shown and was asked to read an article that may not have been um you know pornography in photos but it was certainly verbally uh pornography and i'm wondering how that gets into our classrooms on
138a regular basis and what's being done to prevent those types of articles which are highly inappropriate and and for what purpose those are being taught i i have no idea but how would that fall within this rubric of not coming into the classroom going forward um again it's the high school issue that actually emerged last year um but when that article was published and again the district does not support the use of what was in that article and that content and we follow that up through human resources um when something like that is brought to our attention and i you know interesting enough i i was surprised when we discovered that it was actually utilized last year right after it was published that nobody brought it to us a student or a parent um i
139was surprised by that because again the district agrees that that is not uh that article was not an article that should have been utilized at greenwich high school and going back to the to the con the content at western middle school even there uh i mean how are we handling that component when in fact um you know i believe the principal there you wasn't going to shut that down what i can say is that if the teacher is not teaching to the standards we are following that up through hr and i think it goes back to the presentation that you just saw that we expect teachers to teach to the curriculum to teach the content um that they are expected to teach and certainly they do pull in other resources and it should be to
140support the curriculum at hand and it should be material that is age appropriate and when that's brought to our attention we you know if something goes awry which we don't want it to but if it does we absolutely follow that up from a professional standpoint so is there a way in which to provide more resources for teachers that are pre-approved that they can pull from because if teachers are constantly thinking that they need to pull from youtube which i have no idea why they want to pull from youtube but if they're and if we have a proof content and i think you'd mentioned before in a conversation you and i had that there are approved videos for social emotional learning that are age-appropriate why wouldn't a teacher just take the resources that have already been
141pre-approved rather than going out and finding something else yeah that's a great question and obviously we wish that that that had been the case uh that what was provided had been utilized but i will also say that i think mark and anne are very aggressively pulling this curriculum component together for greenwich public schools because uh it has been harder for teachers to know where to look to find resources when some of it was in aspen some of it was in schoology and and they're working very aggressively i think too with their coordinators their whole team to be able to make sure that it's it's tightened up as far as helping teachers find resources with ease and i do i do think that that that has been part of a challenge for us um you heard
142the european history teachers talk about how old the books were um that they were using we know we are adopting math books this year because we allowed those those books to get nine and ten years old um and i think we we are going to have to make a commitment um from staff perspective and then also when we present the budget to the board to continue to invest in curriculum and resources um foundations i think you can hear loudly and clearly from a lot of parents and teachers that that has been a resource we've needed for a long time so we are addressing it i think i'm trying to get as many materials resources in the hands of teachers so that they don't feel like it is hard um to know what's available so that
143is something we definitely are focused on yeah but i think it goes a little bit more deeper than that in that you have your materials being pulled in and if we look at the materials in western middle school and and the like you you have issues where you very charged political theories are being used in classes and that's not part of our curriculum absolutely and whenever that's brought to our attention we follow it up um you know the expectation is that teachers are teaching to our curriculum that they're um they're they're not supposed to just be pulling in whatever they think is important and in a matter of fact even when we're teaching a controversial issue and you you know you look at the board policy on teaching controversial issues it's really our job as
144an educator to allow those points of views to have discussion in the classroom and not be led uh by the educators point of view no absolutely and i you know i've read that policy and that policy particularly noted that um it is supposed to teach all views and encourage a robust conversation on both sides so that students having various opinions can feel comfortable in having those conversations but i want to make sure i think that we need to give a hard look and that's why christina i wanted to look at those policies to see if we're if we think the policies in place with respect to how teachers are supposed to teach and encourage um students because the the key element for allowing for robust conversations is the fact that students should actually feel comfortable
145and teachers should make their students feel comfortable in a setting in which they can share their views and i'm not sure that's happening either mr yeah so yeah there is no doubt i mean we should just say it almost the second grade video was awful there's no doubt about that um but i think that we also need to tony i like what you said i mean we went through all of our policies in fact just just so you know just so everyone can see oops this is just half of the policies okay so we've gone through all of them um but i think that you made a good point tony is that um we expect our teachers to be professional and that you can't really put a policy in for um but when they're not
146like in my my you know financial world there have to be consequences and it seems like there were and um i think that that's important and it should be uh noted um i wanted to ask something specific to the presentation um and it's really what the ptac academic excellence rep said i thought they had some really good points that i wanted to come back to so i don't know anne if this is to you or mark sorry but um the we need consistency no doubt across our schools and i think that is something we've heard ever since i've been on the board that that's not unfortunately there and you know how can we get comfortable that we are going to get there and um i know it's important that teachers of course have different styles
147and they'll present things differently but i really want to hear that's number one a little bit more about how we're going to have consistency across the schools and then secondly i we always say we need to be partners with our parents but we really need to feel that and um i think that you know i want to know too more about what my my students are learning um because i want to help right i want to be supportive i don't want to make the judgment on what the curriculum you know is for for my third grade or my fifth grade or my eighth grader but i can tell you that the teachers and there was a teacher tonight uh who was one of our distinctive teachers and it doesn't surprise me that she was because
148she tells the class at the beginning of every lesson what's going to be taught and i can then actually have that conversation at the dinner table and i know that's extra work um but it's awesome and i just think if we can have more of that i know that i know i personally would be happier and i expect our parents good as well so if we could just talk to those two pieces that would be great yeah kathleen if i could just uh start with um my hope my hope is that the math textbook review process that we've undergone this year is an example that we're moving in a different direction i think that the makeup of the committee i think the input from our board liaisons i think the valuable input from our staff
149and our parents have brought us to the point of uh where we're presenting what we believe is a comprehensive program which addresses some of the needs of the past to me the big ideas program provides a singular primary resource for teachers to develop their lessons it should eliminate the need or the or the desire to look elsewhere for supporting materials because it's as comprehensive as it is that said no textbook is ever 100 aligned with the standards that we are trying to address so it is the responsibility of the uh content specific coordinator in conjunction with working in teachers in the field to provide those supplements supplemental resources that are vetted before we put them in front of students and i can also tell you that we are working very diligently with our administrators with
150the tefl rubric to make sure that they they are following it and pointing it out to the teachers this is the first year that they have used the temple rubric with our teachers so it's been new and it has different expectations it has higher expectations for teachers to be consistent with the way they prepare their lessons with the way they deliver their lessons and the way they look at the data to make sure that those assessments are showing us that yes indeed they are using the appropriate materials and the curriculum to make sure that their students are getting what they need so we're doing that work uh we've learned a lot this year and mark and i have really worked very closely together with our coordinators and some of our lead teachers to make sure
151that we are supporting our teachers and guiding them to make those good professional choices if they do bring in anything that's not vetted by us at this point we are really trying to make sure that we put processes in place for teachers to bring to their administrators materials that have not been approved by the district to see are these the appropriate materials to use so we have a a lot of questions that and checklist that we're developing so that we can have teachers have access to that so if they have a supplemental material they can go through that checklist and say yes yes no oh i better go see the principal and get some some support from them and get their opinion kathleen what i would also add to that and and to me this
152excites me greatly and i think it's a positive step forward is that we're reinstating our coordinators so that they span into the middle schools i think this year that was a challenge for us i'm excited about the fact that we will have that reach and i'm equally as excited that we have decided to make this we've decided to split and have a math coordinator and a science coordinator to me it makes all the difference in the world when you can have an expert in a particular field focus on the constant renewal curriculum materials for teachers helpful thank you all right mr cher peter you are mute again i i want to be constructive here uh but i have to tell you this conversation is infuriating me and the reason it's infuriating me is we've had
153uh we have obviously had major system failures in the management of our curriculum and i realized this thing just got slapped on the agenda because as the public doesn't know but board members know and tony jones know i sent out a note after we had these recent failures demanding that we discuss this right away as a board thank you for at least putting it on the agenda but um i'm really really troubled i'll say this and then i'll move on i'm really really troubled by this conversation from the administrators um it first of all all of these things that you guys are talking about that we need and you're doing are things that all of you just undid that we long had in the in the district and we never had this problem okay we
154had full coordinators k-12 that was a very recent decision to reorganize them so that they didn't do that we had a k-12 curriculum director that decision was made in the last 12 months to eliminate that position to redirect resources elsewhere on the recommendation of the superintendent that was her decision to do that um this the way we managed curriculum and all the things you're talking about this was completely 100 percent foreseeable this is the reason and i raised this issue and got nothing but an argument from the superintendent at the time that this is why i was not voting for the 2021 budget because we were stripping resources out of curriculum and curriculum management we were fracturing the management of it at in terms of leadership and we were going to put our teachers in
155a very bad position this has been a problem that is completely foreseeable and we have the problem now and what's most troubling with me about this is there is this undertone of blaming teachers for what happened teachers didn't use right judgment i mean i wrote down all these comments it's shocking no the board and the top cabinet leadership created this situation told our teachers to go out and get their own content as a procedure and we knew about it and it was 100 predictable what has occurred and what's bothering me the most and mark with all due respect when you came into your job you didn't even know what our procedures and policies were i you and i had a conversation about this and i pointed you to these but these were decisions that were
156very recently made and that we're paying a price for the decisions that are made i'm not hearing the team stand up and say ah you know what we're new to this we made these decisions we put ourselves in this position we've now root caused it we know how we got to the position of the recent events we have four of these guys four events one in the one in elementary one in the middle school two in the high school in the span of 30 days i've served on the board 12 i can tell you in the 12 years i've served this has never happened before we had a curriculum management system it had its warts it had its lack of implementation everywhere but it worked and it worked for 10 nearly 11 years that i've
157been serving on this board the fact that we've had these problems is a completely brand new phenomena and i'm just really worried that the thread here isn't a self-reflection as an organization to realize we made a series the series of decisions were made by everybody here i didn't vote for it but it doesn't matter i'm a member of the board so i'm accountable and it's really bothering me that there aren't people who are just saying stepping up and acknowledging this was a screw-up it was predictable it's based upon decisions when we made we now need to take corrective action i mean i'm shocked and then i'll get off my horse to hear tony jones say you know are you dr jones or tony you don't need to say tony jones dr jones said we need
158to invest in curriculum and people five months after we're cutting that department cutting resources out of that department on our most recent development look if i may mr um i do just want to point out that when you talk about the high school issue um that happened under the old structure it was last year uh yes it was utilized again at the beginning of this year that was under the old structure and i think that's one of the reasons we really worked to try and restructure central office and i feel like the team that we have now and the work that they are doing i do believe we're going to be in a much better place uh there than where we have been in the last few years where we stretched people trying to work
159across k-12 and if you even just look at the one position and what we ask of sheilas of all to actually work kindergarten through 12th grade and to be over science technology engineering and math we have not cut a lead position at central office uh mr d'amico is now in that position we did fill that position so we uh i'm not going to debate it we took people look we take people well actually you basically asked a question if there's not a question move on i'm gonna say i'm gonna move off of this topic but i cannot let these things that aren't true go unchallenged look we took people who were curriculum coordinators curriculum support people it's in our budget center and they got redirected to other jobs were made that we did cut was
160pe absolutely i communicated that to the board and our coaches that were out coaching those are not that they were not part of the curriculum writing team necessarily at central office but they are math interventionist and the one thing that the board including you have asked me to do since the day i started here was to be as responsible as i could in bringing a budget that is within guidelines that will make sure that we can provide what we need for our children and at that point in time math interventionists and i still believe uh were a top priority in comparison to having those six or five and six coaching positions and that was the decision that i made i own that decision and i think it was the right one and i think in
161the middle of cobit had we not put in math interventionists we probably would have been scrambling in the middle of this year uh trying to trying to do it in the middle of the year because it was a real need that we had um and it is it's a it's a series of tough decision making but i feel like we have the right team in central office and um i think they're doing some great work mark the question that i want to ask is about your chart on your chart you reference um [Music] if you can pull up the chart which one peter uh there's nothing on the screen sure i can't see it so yeah uh back at number um [Music] three i think it's three i can't read that that's too small stop
162terminology one yeah you're you're referencing policy 63 6141 i want to understand what you're in what you think uh what you're saying in this what's the implication of what you're saying in this um paragraph that you're that you're uh citing because i read it as textbooks shall be defined as supplemental references shall not be considered textbooks what what was your purpose in highlighting that that's our policy a board policy sorry i don't know i know i know i know peter they didn't cite the entire policy they extracted a small part of the policy and i wanted to understand from the administration why they did that and what they think that means why are they communicating that in this chart man i don't know who did this chart you mean the textbook um chart it says
163right here policy 6161 equipment books materials provision selection you said tech it says textbooks and electronic learning and you've you've underlined and bolded some things here so i'm trying to understand what you're trying to communicate so i we because we are um just finished with our new k-8 textbook uh presentation and looking at the various texts that we could use we wanted to show that they are the primary or basic reading for students in a particular subject such as math science ap courses whatever they happen to be okay and um student selection during the entire year supplemental and reference books are not considered to be textbooks so i didn't want to have people think that when we get a reference book say for the library or supplemental materials for the library media centers they are
164not considered textbooks but they are considered supplemental resources okay because then what i'm trying to understand is is that um the what you've presented tonight in in what i've read is a little bit of a change in the way that we have managed uh curriculum and the board's involvement in curriculum in alignment to state statutes and the process that we've had for such a long time and you seem to be you guys seem to be proposing changes in the way we do that and i'm i'm trying to evaluate and understand those uh changes you know like in our policy as an example 6161 there's a state statute that's critical in this area that is not referenced now you wouldn't know that that's the responsibility of policy governance committee and the board to know that but
165there's one really critical state statute that outlines obligations of the boards of education uh that is missing in that it also uh it says in some places that as a board we're required to review and approve textbooks and it also continues and says other instructional materials when you ask the lawyers at the legislature what their legislative intent in that is they're pretty clear about that what what i think was important for board members haven't been through this before or haven't served on the curriculum committee to understand is is that there's a lot of areas where we delegate our responsibilities to the administrators and then there's some areas where because of state statute we can't really do that we've kind of always pushed the limit in greenwich on that and it's worked and served us really
166well we've delegated a lot of our legal responsibilities to administrators prior superintendents prior directors of curriculum [Music] and it worked as i said earlier we've never really had a problem with that but part of the reason that it worked is that the board always made clear in addition to policy uh the board has always spoken with one voice about this we do not want a curriculum in greenwich that is politicized in any way i know other districts do that it's a whole debate in the country but we have always spoken as a board with one voice saying we don't want that and we've asked the superintendent to make sure that our curriculum never gets politicized left or right center i don't care where it's it's it's a unique cultural value that we have always um
167for decades um honored in greenwich and our administrators have helped us do that the second thing that occurred is that um and dr jones referred to this um in controversial issues we've always had the value that's very clear we want our students to to develop as thinkers and argue both sides of an argument and so on and so forth but we've been very very clear anytime that in the curriculum anything controversial is going to be put in the curriculum both sides of any point of view on a particular topic must be presented and that has always been honored uh not that's one side and the last thing that we've always done is we have relied on our director of curriculum to highlight and bring to the board proactively any part of the curriculum and it
168was usually in uh social studies or anything relating to science and health to highlight to the board and bring forward for consultation anything that had the potential to be controversial so that the board could give guidance it's helped because the board hasn't had to review math as an example we can leave that in the hands of the administrators uh traditionally we've been able to leave english in the hands of the administrators or phys pe in the hands of the administrators because it's not areas of the curriculum where controversial topics or political points of view could really be introduced in a meaningful way the the the problem that i think we've run into recently this is my root cause of the analysis of this we have broken down the system to honor those values and implementation
169i don't know that happened in the transition to the superintendent new people reorganization mark getting his job i don't know could be 20 reasons i'm not putting any values but that happened and the second thing that has kind of happened is um we it's clear to me we have not reinforced the teachers where the guard rails are and we put them in a horribly bad position and there are some teachers who've been with us a really long time they know the rules of the road um they may not agree with them but that's okay they know the rules of the road and they're implementing it every day in their classroom then there are some others who it hasn't happened with fidelity i think and i'll end it on this point and let others speak based
170on my experience with this based on my work serving now on this committee and with you and of course your predecessor irene with karen hirsch and so on and so forth um i always do my homework and i i think the system has broken down and we need to go back to some basics i think of what you've provided here might provide that framework but i'm not comfortable that you guys have completely analyzed based on recent events what the root cause is and how we prevent to miss kowalski's point of view how do we make sure this doesn't happen and we go back where we were where we didn't have a controversy we had no controversy i mean i'll give you one last example i'm very concerned how it was mischaracterized what happened at western
171middle school and it tells me that we haven't faced up to that i mean what happened at western middle school is and you guys and board members if you haven't seen it go look at it it was an english class okay think about that it's an english class not a social studies class it's an english class and the students were given the macintosh survey which you should all google it and look it up if you haven't read it it's a 40 question questionnaire to have a student evaluate their white privilege it's called a white privilege checklist that's its name all right now i'm not putting a value judgment on whether that's good or that's bad but just like we had the conversation about and i don't want to respond to miss moose question about it
172i don't want to politicize this the point of it is is that when that gets introduced into an english class it's not honoring all those different things that we have long honored in the system a de-politicized curriculum multiple points of view it just didn't get implemented that way and what troubled me is that we got two different answers about that we got one answer that said it was a rogue teacher and we got a different answer 24 hours later which it was part of a curriculum that had been going on for a while i don't know what's the answer i don't want to have an investigation into the answer but it's those kinds of inconsistencies that are not okay so we got to get back to basics we i applaud putting resources back that were
173stripped out i was very vocal about that was going to lead to a problem it was not going to support our teachers i support you guys in that 100 but we've got a little bit more work to do to recognize what has transpired and not sweep it under the rug but face it openly and realize some serious failures happened and we need to make the corrections going forward so that they never happen again thank you um you know i've got you're muted peter sorry uh thank you for telling me that because i'm just sitting here talking to myself i actually have a very different view of the history i've been on the board for eight years and and quite frankly uh i wouldn't be surprised and i'm sure mr d'amico won't say it but what
174he probably found was not a a complete set of documents to start from um you know we uh we did not start in a good place we have not been in a good place in curriculum for a while but it's not about the the extra materials it really is overall the curriculum uh and that leads us to the place where we don't have supplemental materials in some spots but the department wasn't cut it was realigned in a way that actually makes a lot more sense to me in terms of of separating it out by the levels and having continuity as it all flows through dr carabillo and i think that we're you know we're going to see the the fruit of that the uh the the two goals that you've set that were on your
175uh your powerpoint i think are the right ones your future goals right updating the curriculum so it aligns and actually works and making sure you've got the the exemplars that the teachers can rely on um but we you know our in terms of our investment and curriculum they used to do the summer curriculum institute they didn't get through all the work and then they basically were forcing new curriculum on teachers right before school started it was never a good model so i think moving away from that is actually a very good thing and you can be a lot more thoughtful in in the work you're doing and i think that'll let you fill in the holes we have cut curriculum as a board to make our budget numbers we've done that we warned the bet
176about it we warned the rtm about it we talked openly about it at our meetings i i think that that is something that we we need to fight for because if our curriculum isn't in the right place and the materials that are needed to execute that curriculum are in the right place we're never going to have consistency across the district uh we're never going to move the needle and we're going to find ourselves you know kind of always running from behind you know when we when we talk about these uh these issues though um you know we have a policy we have plenty of policies we don't lack for policies i think some of this is about making sure our teachers know our policies and know the expectations of them and and i think if
177we want them to exercise good professional judgment we'll continue to communicate and i know dr jones has done some communicating about that we've had that conversation offline you know in terms of what we learn from this is we can do better in terms of making materials available we can do better in terms of making sure they know where to go if they have a question you know i've heard people describe these materials pornography look i watched the video okay there is a portion of of kids that that video is appropriate for it was not appropriate for second grade i think we can all agree on that but pornography you know justice potter stewart said obscenity is uh he knows it when he sees it i don't think that that's pornography and i think referring to
178it that way is uh is the unfair characterization of what it is it was inappropriate for those students that is not pornography look teachers need to be responsible right they need to be responsible for age and subject to pervert materials they need to have an outlet to go to if they are lacking those materials or if they find something they want to use but they're not sure about it they have to be able to exercise some judgment to teach difficult topics we we know we have that right we had an election uh last november that was heated and the country was heated about it uh are we talking that civics classes can't have a discussion about that election i don't think so are we talking about uh about making certain topics off limits no that's
179that's not what we need to be doing but we do need to make sure that that our teachers are equipped to be able to talk about those things in a fair and balanced way and and to do that it requires communicating with them and i think that that is what dr jones and mr d'amico and dr carabil are talking about communicating with the teachers making resources available and and basically ensuring that they're carried out in a certain way and that's what the evaluation process is for you know when i when i come to this i just i think of two questions really you know what did we learn from this and and what did we do to correct it and prevent it from happening again i'm i'm hearing movement in the right direction i think
180that uh you know it's not this guy is not following we have 900 teachers they're doing amazing work with our students things happen um i'm actually quite curious to hear from ms olson because she's the only teacher on the board right we're not in the classroom we have we have theories about what we want to see in here mr sharer i can see you on the phone so you might want to turn your camera off um we we have theories about it but quite honestly you know our role is is set in a certain way um i will close with this i have always been frustrated with when you go and look at the policies and you look at the state statute about curriculum you know what the board's role is all of this work
181used to happen in the summer about changing and moving curriculum around and it never came back to the board and i think that that's something that we should have a conversation about but we are not the uh we are not the thought police we should not be hand-picking materials used in classrooms suggesting books that's not our role so let's make sure we understand what our role is and then we execute it well with that mr kelly thank you mr bernstein i will challenge you on something though for a second i think that uh if you believe that coaches are not teachers uh then you've never had a good coach uh i have worked i think i'm the only one here on the board who has actually worked for the greater school district and i worked
182for a decade uh i want to go over some personal experiences because i appreciate the observations of policy and looking down on this this instance let me start with uh the uh video that was shown to the second grade was outrageous uh it it disturbing and should not have been shown to those children uh we have to find out what went wrong of course and i i love the pers the perception of the aspect of of looking at it from the top down uh you remember me a little bit and let me go into my time working with the uh uh with the greenwich school district uh as a coach uh at uh at one point 150 kids every day six days a week well six days not seven days a week for two hours
183a day were put under my charge now i had five coaches working for me those five coaches were being supervised by me to make sure they were behaving appropriately i gave them a practice plan uh they had to do a lot of work on their own uh to figure out what to teach the kids but i monitored those coaches and made sure uh an example of a misbehaving coach might be a coach yelling at a child uh i would take that the coach aside i'd reprimand that coach and tell him not to yell at the students anymore that's not the appropriate way to get the message across something that might escalate is a coach using foul language uh towards the students i would then bring that up i might have to bring the athletic director
184into the discussion we might have to meet the three of us the coach the athletic director and myself and talk about what that coach should not be doing as far as his behavior uh the uh if something more serious happens uh and we have to go to the athletic director and the athletic director believes it's a further problem we might have to go to the school principal high school principal and we'll discuss the issue we'll handle it accordingly now what we did or i did my experience of 10 years of doing this we had situations which we handled sometimes at my level sometimes at the athletic director's level and sometimes at the principal's level i believe that's the structure that should be in place uh and uh that work for us uh it's i know
185it's different than the schools uh but also too we uh we then the other the classrooms uh but we also were teaching kids in the same manner and making sure that the uh uh the coaches were accountable for their behavior i was accountable the athletic director made sure of that and the athletic director was accountable by the uh by the principal of the high school uh we oftentimes would have to go to the to youtube uh to get drills uh we would be responsible enough to go over those videos in advance uh before we gave them to the kids but there was a lot of uh there was not a lot of guidance other than you will run a rugby program and you'll teach the kids there's an interview process in order to bring a
186coach a head coach aboard he's responsible for the coaches working for him a lot of questions were asked the interview process was thorough and uh and good people were hired but mistakes can happen along the way but what you want to do is take those mistakes and learn from those mistakes and make sure that that structure or a good structure's in place to address those now if a coach had used a foul language uh during the course of a practice and is the superintendent responsible for that coach using foul language well you know what the athletic director is going to hear that from either the kid complaining or the uh a parent complaining because the kid might bring that home to the parent so checks and balances took place in the structure that i had
187now i guess mark and anne uh the questions i have are my experience working ten years with the district do we have a structure that is in place checks and balances where if a situation that happened to the second grade their direct superior immediately identifies that and then brings that to the next level and if it's not in place are we changing anything to make sure this stuff does not happen going forward joe absolutely the process that you just outlined is exactly what we do in schools so as a former principal one of the things i would always encourage my teachers to do is be risk takers and innovators but i was also very clear with them that if they were going to try something new for the very first time it needed to go
188across my desk first this way i could be sure that i'm putting a set of eyes on it with the level of experience that i have to make sure that what they're doing is appropriate they also do that within their team they do it with the support of instructional coaches or the assistant principal but certainly i think one thing that you touched upon that's very similar in schools as to coaching is that it's the responsibility of the building administrators to actively engage in conversations with teachers and visit their classrooms the best way to inspect what you expect is to be out and about in the rooms well that's good i'm glad that's in place that certainly makes me feel more comfortable because these things have to be addressed and stopped i know that also too
189as a coach in order to keep the attention of young students uh sometimes had to get a little um i guess uh edgy you had to get something to get their attention you had to make sure that you didn't just go on playing boring topics you sometimes stepped into topics that might be somewhat controversial just to get their uh attention something that i guess mr bernstein made a reference to the uh political environment uh some time ago where maybe you wanted to work on discourse discourse amongst the students and try to go over that topic between push-ups and passing drills and just to try to get their attention because a good coach takes those opportunities where those kids are paying attention to teach them and we would do that and and if it did get
190to the point where it did get back to my superior and it's amazing i do have to give a compliment to our athletic department there were ears everywhere something was a little bit controversial at times i get uh athletic director lindeen stopping me in the hallway saying joe did something happen along the way and we shared that conversation so the structure is good there and i hope uh that structure that i know that my experience with that decade of working with the schools i hope that is the same i'm glad you said what you said and you uh you have the same uh structure in in your uh uh your your uh charge absolutely and mark and i also meet with the administrators regularly both of us to make sure that we are listening to
191them that we are hearing if there are any challenges within the building if there are any things that they are hearing that they need our support from and also the work on our tefl committee our teaching and learning committee has done a lot of work on our domains that i will be sharing with you at the end of the year that really focus on what is happening in the classroom and having principles be in the classroom and assistant principals being in the classroom being more visible making sure that they are looking for that information and that data that teachers are following that guaranteed curriculum and if they need support that we can support them as soon as possible well thank you and one last comment will be that i know uh that if one of
192my coaches i had stepped out of line and did something inappropriate certainly uh uh we'll just say hypothetically in the same category as the second grade video uh i'd certainly make sure that that that coach was uh uh disciplined accordingly and i trust that uh that uh this scene these superiors to that uh uh that teacher in many of the examples that were made as the few examples are made today uh hopefully they'll be addressed properly and and making sure that that doesn't happen again thank you very much thank you miss hirsch i wanted to thank dr parabello and uh mr d'amico for the presentation this evening um you know i i know that uh a lot of thought went into that um and i know instead of talking about uh some of the specifics
193that were within that um we've veered into other areas um and um you know i while mistakes were certainly made and it is not for me to opine on something that is a staffing issue you know i it does certainly bring up for us which is why policy governance has gone through all of our uh curriculum uh policies you know uh ways to look to improve and make positive changes and and i do see that these positive changes are certainly starting to be made you know i point to the fact that we do have a policy on academic freedom um teachers are certainly uh able to select uh some of their own materials and methods of instruction um and that was one of the questions i sort of uh i had a quick question on
194um as our teachers are certainly allowed to to to um have some add-ons uh for them and i know you're working towards building a better library of those materials for teachers um how often are our curricular and ancillary ancillary good good lord i can't speak this evening materials kind of reviewed um you know i know our students are certainly asked to uh to look at those materials and critically analyze uh the material and our teachers really work with um the subject matter to help our students really delve into them which really does make a difference when we're reading things in isolation it's hard to it's hard to know how they're being utilized in the classroom but obviously some of the materials that we've seen recently uh may not have been the most appropriate to have
195shared with our students um you know at the middle and high school level certainly um so i and definitely in the second grade level but i just was wondering how often those materials are reviewed karen i can tell you what it needs to be and what the focus is moving forward which is in my opinion curriculum needs to be reviewed throughout the course of each school year and certainly more comprehensively in the summer i believe mr bernstein had mentioned the the past model was to bring teachers in to work with coordinators over the summer and yes we will continue to do that this summer however i'm reevaluating that because there could be a much better way for us to provide curriculum to teachers there are agencies that we can partner with that have curriculum writing
196teams specialists in each field that could do the work probably more efficiently and effectively uh you know we ask a lot of our teachers to give up some of their summer to try and get six weeks of work in three weeks or two weeks that's a lot to ask and you can certainly then expect fractures and and what we're able to produce you know i think it's a very fair statement to say that inconsistencies erode public trust my goal is to eliminate as many inconsistencies as we can both in terms of curriculum practices that are in current place and then also in terms of the materials that are available to teachers and karen to your point one of the selling points for schoology was that when teachers engage in the platform they have the ability
197to provide feedback on the lessons that have been given to them whether it was a successful one uh whether it missed the mark whether they were able to modify it and share it so that all of the teachers across the district could engage in that constant process of reflection so i hope that's helpful uh you know in it definitely is um you you sort of um put forward something that i find uh very interesting when you're talking about ways to provide uh better materials like i you know our teachers are certainly working overtime this year um having to take the lessons that they are teaching and figure out new ways to deliver those uh both in a hybrid model uh versus you know remotely as well as for in-class students and and i certainly know
198how hard that must be i'm not a teacher um but uh i grew up with one um so i know how hard they work um and so my question to you um again would be you know i i know that we're we're going through everything and vetting them and um i know we're putting up i've been asking for years to make sure that uh curriculum standards are being shared with parents so that they can support their students at home um you know i know that as a parent at glenville um our teachers every time a new unit was uh being introduced to our students the teachers would send that information home to parents um and send sort of information as to what the students were sort of looking at is you know is that still
199being done i know it also happened uh when i was at western it's still happening for me um at the high school level uh in many of the classes um is that still happening um at the elementaries in middles karen i can tell you in many areas it's happening but i can't tell you with certainty that it's consistent and again if it's good for one school or a series of schools it should be a common place in all of our schools yeah you know i that was something that i had recommended ages ago and i still think would be great for for every subject matter you know teachers have those emails that they send out and it could be a great resource if they are able to share uh that so teachers don't have to
200start from scratch every time information that they share with parents but um because i i think that's sort of critical then the more the more we know and can support our educators uh the more they can support our students um and i guess the last so that leads me to my last question i know you talked about when k-8 um curriculum and standards uh and disciplines were going to be hopefully available for parents to review um and i'll ask dr carabillo is there are there any plans to be able to do that at the high school level as well as i'm sure parents might want to know i know we spent a lot of time talking about k-8 that's something that we have started a conversation about we have so many different courses i think
201it would be difficult but we are talking about it and seeing if we can come up with some kind of format that may be very helpful so that parents know what is going on i know i've had conversations with the program administrators about how do teachers inform their students and their parents about what is expected in those courses so it's something that i want to make sure is consistent across every course at the high school so that's work that we are starting now well thank you i will say a huge thank you to both of you because consistency is certainly key across classrooms across buildings and across some you know from grade to grade so i really appreciate that you guys are doing the hard work and starting to make sure that there is that
202consistency um i know parents uh have always been concerned when they speak to friends with students in other schools that things are being taught in different uh poetry might be taught in one school but ahead of other literature um but students all get the same within the same year i think having that opportunity for parents to see what's being taught throughout the whole year uh will be very helpful so i appreciate that you guys are doing that hard work thank you and mark i just want to let you know i think i heard barbara o'neil cheer from across town when you said you would look externally for curriculum and materials it's something that the board talked about for years and never seemed to get any traction so i'm happy to hear that as well but
203i know barbara's cheering so thank you all right miss olsen thank you um i know i wasn't even going to raise my hand i really agreed a lot with what mr mr bernstein's comments sort of for me hit the nail on the head and he's like i want to hear from a teacher i'm like fine i'll raise my hand but um i i mean i do have some things to say but i first just before i before i forget you know talking about getting um curriculum you know getting get the funding was cut right for some of our professional development and now we're talking about getting some you know really working through curriculum and i just want to put it out there too that uh greenwich alliance you know they say like we're here to
204help let us know how we can help um in certain areas if that's something i want to remind us to sometimes tap into that because the greenwich alliance is looking for ways to to to help our educators with curriculum with morale with whatever so um just to put that out there um in terms of the the recent events i guess if you want to call it better um you know obviously it doesn't need to be said again the video is not appropriate for second grade the writing not appropriate for 10th grade i'm the reading from what i saw um of the article not appropriate for 10th grade lesson those those aside um you know i i really do believe that you know teachers need to be allowed to have a certain level of professionalism and
205also as was that academic freedom and those who combine the professionalism with the academic freedom with the support you know and work as a team you know teachers don't create curriculum should never be created just in a bubble right it's it's it's collaborative it's always teamwork and curriculum should never be completed there's no such thing as here's my scope and sequence i'm done now there's no such thing it's an ongoing process like it never ends it's not like what's your curriculum for this year well you know i'm sure you know this now like you're still figuring out like what exactly are we what is the most you know important valuable material that we need to get through this year and how are we going to deliver that so there's there's so many parts to it
206it's sort of a complicated thing but it's never done in a vacuum and it's never completed um and you know as was said earlier it's always a growth process it's something that you you look at you you fine-tune and every single scope and sequence i've ever said always says work in progress it should be a work in progress so you should never stop working on it you know um and i think the teamwork the support the the um the support from the administrators um you know the the visibility but also knowing that like you had said you know mr amiko and you're a principal having an open door policy having not just feeling like administrators are always in their classrooms as teachers but also that teachers can walk into the administrator and say hey here's
207what i'm thinking what you know what do you think about this um in terms of like in terms of youtube it was mentioned like who would use youtube and then um you know um i've used youtube it's just important to preview you know i mean there's a lot of valuable catchy catchy songs on there different things that that i used to teach you know grammatical points or vocabulary or verb conjugations like youtube is i we have a whole list of of youtube videos on our on our website you know um on a page where we're at a place where i teach like as long as they're approved as long as they're previewed youtube can be a valuable tool it's something that students connect with actually so that that's that's not that's not a bad tool
208uh just needs to obviously be vetted and previewed um i don't know what else i was going to say i that might be that might be the gist of it um you know i think it's just important that i think it's just important that also context right so you know kathleen mentioned that you know one of the distinguished teachers always said here's my objective here's my goal here's what i'm going to teach that should be every teacher should say here's my goal here's my here's here's my objective here the students will be able to x y and z by the end of this lesson you know and when that's out there and that's clearly communicated then the then the you know parents know what the students are going to learn the students know what the
209student's going to learn you know whether that's sent out in an email or a newsletter whatever that looks like as long as we're communicating what our goal is what our objective is whether it's dialogue and you know an interactive dialogue sometimes it is going to fall around an election year or something around politics sometimes it is going to be a hot topic but what is the context like i i you know um there's that if we just take random stamping to say we can't give this particular survey or we can't teach this particular thing without knowing the context um that's a different story again i'm not talking about those couple of outliers i'm just saying generally speaking like there's always context um and and i think i think that needs to be um uh you
210know people need to keep that in mind as well um but so i don't know that's that's what i got um you said it's a teacher's perspective but um i i also just say that i i do i do i really do trust in this process i i think that you know having i think that i do see teamwork between the k to say you know that the you know k-5 the high school versus elementary middle um seeing you two work together and um there's a big difference from k through 12 right so so having it broken up by by both of you um does seem to make sense to me and i do sort of trust in the structure of this so that's it thank you mr share and then let's try to wrap
211it up because we still have multiple other agenda items peter you're muted mark i didn't understand something you said in response to uh miss hirsch um we were talking about schoology and access to information i i i didn't understand that i mean i've been on the board when the superintendent came to us and said we need five hundred thousand dollars to buy a content management system for curriculum they came in and they asked for it and they wanted it and it was a learning management system and we authorized the money and they got it they then spent seven years mapping curriculums to clean all this up schoology was never meant to be the repository for curriculum i don't know how that happened schoology was meant to be supporting communications between [Music] a parent a student
212and teacher it was supposed to be the place that the students could access the curriculum and it was supposed to be the place that the students could communicate and and uh work with the teacher i'm not really sure how those two systems got mixed up like that because we spent millions of dollars on these things so and i'm also interested to say when someone's out there storing curriculum and google drive i mean board members have ids on aspen for looking at curriculum uh it's a curriculum repository so i i wasn't clear what you were talking about when you were saying it all got mixed up and the tools don't work and and then you reference the tools in maybe a way i guess i hadn't expected i also understood part of the reason when the
213administration at that time presented schoology is one of their selling points you could go back and look at the documents they presented in the archive on the board they presented it as that will be the place that parents can also see what their kids are working in what's coming what's in the class and that the issue of course is always infidelity of implementation by a teacher if a teacher puts that information out there in a really rich way for the student and for them parents can see it they can really plug in and support if it's out there in a haphazard way then they can't but you know i didn't understand what you were talking about when you said tools and that can you can you clarify that yeah i'm not sure i use the
214word tools peter but when you go into schoology you know you have the opportunity to set up a course a class a group or resources what i was referring to is the resource section where teachers go to identify instructional materials and there's a communication thread in there where teachers can leave comments for other teachers after their experience in using a particular lesson correct that that that's that's what i was referring to but they're also using they're the the curriculum repository for the district is aspen aspen aspen live is our curriculum mapper yeah and it's the place the curriculum map right the scope and secret is that is that right i mean i'm just trying to understand if i was hearing something different schoology has a a a a vast amount of our curriculum stored in
215it now you mentioned you mentioned something very accurate there are teachers that have shared google drives where their information is living in more than one location and that's a challenge and it's a concern because as we said curriculum is constantly updated and refreshed and if you have it living in multiple places you might not always remember to go to all of those places to make those changes we really need to get to a place where we have one curriculum management platform where teachers can confidently upload any materials that they may have and where our coordinators can download the materials that we're creating for our teachers okay so that's good i i'd like to get an update when you guys figure out exactly how you're going to re-implement that with these systems to do that my
216my second question was i mean we've always had this debate in the board i never was comfortable with this sidebar curriculum institutes in the summer i just chose not to completely fight that battle because you know there were there was a majority of the board who would you know fawn at at superintendents who wanted to do that but it was predictable what's happening when you're writing your own curriculum and you're using norm regular classroom teachers who by the way are paid over the summer it's not like they're coming in and volunteering their time it's extra work they get paid to do in addition to their normal annual salary and they chose to come in and do it and and i got a lot of feedback teachers liked doing it so it was you know but
217we had this situation where we're always rolling our own instead of buying um fully integrated packages from professional curriculum and content developers um it's not surprising we kind of in my book you kind of wind up in these kinds of places where it's slow to do curriculum so on and so forth despite everybody working hard is your intent i heard you kind of say i want to go from having that done internally to having it done outsourcing what is your thought about just not doing that anymore and actually buying off the shelf and modifying from there buying from textbook manufacturers because there's a plethora of them there's an explosion of content available so it's something we're going to explore peter one of the things that i will mention um and you talked about this there
218are teachers that absolutely uh enjoy coming in and doing the curriculum work over the summer and the the there is a perspective that when you have the teachers within the district writing or revising the curriculum that you get more immediate buy-in by their um colleagues because they were invested in the work so that you know that that's one that's one consideration right yeah but the other the other consideration and it's something i really want to aggressively explore but it's going to have financial implications is just exactly what is the price tag if we wanted to i don't know let's say it was social studies it was elementary social studies and we wanted to completely overhaul and repackage the social studies curriculum but we wanted it to be done professionally by an outside vendor i don't
219know what that would cost and that would certainly have implications when we put forth our our budget for next year um mark and let me ask this is my last question um structurally i think you know this and you know it's going to sound gorpy to other people uh megan as a teacher may not have even been aware of this um long-standing practice in the district which was a source of huge exposure and it came home to roost in the worst way i know people want to put nice words around it like recent events and what have you um you know that's kind of like for me perfuming the pig i call it what it is um the the situation um is we put our teachers in a place where you know those three bubbles
220you laid out where we were essentially asking teachers we were truncating what was coming out of central office in terms of curriculum and we were asking teachers to go get additional content in their individual lesson plans that was a philosophy in the curriculum department it really exposed teachers because they're out having to get content my question is have you given recent events have you and ann already essentially put out new guidance in a memorandum to teachers essentially banning that practice or putting more guard guidelines around that because i think a lot of this happened because we told teachers i mean the administrators told teachers in some cases you got to go get your own content i mean look at what happened to 10th grade it was an english assignment and it was a uh it
221was an assignment which is called out as a very specific thing in connecticut state department of education curriculum guidelines it's called out in our policies as a very specific thing the teacher decided to pull down an article uh about toxic masculinity which is a particularly loaded subject and decided to create a an assignment presumably in support of a unit around that now that was incredibly bad judgment by that teacher i don't even know who that teacher is but at the same time i mean to lay that off completely on the teacher it is not okay because i know you know as well as i do that teacher wasn't off doing it that was done over a summer they prepared it as assignment i'm sure there are other people at the high school who knew that
222that was prepared it was done in more than one class this idea that it was like this teacher off on their own is um it's probably i mean i don't know we'll find out but i'm sure it was a little more involved than that and i'm wondering to what degree now that we've faced this you guys have uh published a memorandum to staff giving them better guidance to fill in these obvious failures and gaps have you guys done that we have not sent out a memorandum to uh administrators but we have had the conversation with our administrators at our meetings as to what the expectation is we also i have had a conversation with the administration at the high school about making sure that they have their teachers um reviewing what types of ancillary writings
223they may be sharing and that there is a checklist that has been developed by bridget barry and she has shared that with all of her teachers and so that that's a remediation she's put in place based upon what just happened correct um and then ann or i guess back to you mark because i think you do middle school did i mean the episode at western middle school you know i don't know whether things have been taught or not it definitely shouldn't have been thought with that controversial subject without engaging parents to ms hirsch's point parents should have been aware of that if it was going to be something as controversial as that so that they could participate in the educational process um but the other thing that came out is that was originally presented as
224something done by that teacher by themselves but it was subsequently revealed that that lesson was developed with an academic coach from uh having wire headquarters so i'm wondering mark to what degree so that that kind of episode doesn't happen again what guidance has been given there do the academic report coaches do the academics um not academic math coaches some of the humane coaches so on and so forth i guess we got rid of those do this report to you mark or do they report to somebody else they report to me peter including k.a this year they report to me we as i said uh mark and i have been collaborating a lot every day and we have looked at what was in place and how we needed to change it to be more effective and
225to be more supportive to administrators and teachers so currently i i supervise them but mark and i again meet with them together and we invite them to our administrative meetings to make sure that they know what the expectation is and what we're talking about and the support that they can give the teachers when needed and we also have the coordinators attend those meetings bi-monthly or bi-weekly i can't remember which it's getting me but um we have them attend those meetings as well so that we can really open the lines of communication we do not want to have the silos that have been um have been in central office and i believe that this structure that we're looking at now and we're revising and developing and changing and learning about is really going to make a
226positive difference yeah i i hope it's true we're the only district around us stanford norwalk fairfield westport dairy and new canaan we're the only one around us with this structure and you know as i say i try to stay out of that stuff because that's the purview of the but we're the everybody should know we're the only one who's organized this way to do this and if you guys want to organize this way that's your prerogative but it's got to work um i'd like to i'd like to hold on a sec peter one other thing i'd like to ask is you guys presented a curriculum review cycle it was presented to the board i'd like to encourage us now based on recent events to probably take that up in the curriculum committee again just so
227we can all stay aligned on what you guys are planning on working on and uh we can help and support you in that work so that um this moves forward effectively all right thank you we are going to move on to our next agenda item which is the strategic plan update so mr cher the floor is yours oh boy um okay uh thank you everyone uh let me just uh pull up some some notes here um as you'll know we provided a strategy update uh earlier in 2021 um let me just remind you where we are in the strategy process uh we have a lot on our plate so it's easy to get lost just reminder to board members we have an existing strategy we all voted on that unanimously last june to extend it
228until replaced so the administration should be executing against what the current strategy is um because we may never replace it um but in the meantime that's what they should be working with uh you'll recall we had a working session to review and validate and modify our vision emission that was a long time ago pre-covered but the point was we came away with a clear concept and there was consensus amongst the board of what's in there and moving forward based upon that agreement so we got that part done we're now at the part of the process where we're surveying key stakeholders to make sure all their voices are heard in this process you might remember uh if you'd forgotten that uh our committee which is karen karen and i supported by dr jones we went and
229looked at information that we would need as an input to any revision of strategy in an effort not to be redundant and prevent uh survey fatigue because there are a lot of surveys that have been out with the public we went and looked at what information do we already have from existing surveys a good example of that would be the annual panorama survey which is looking at student engagement staff engagement a whole bunch of different types of engagement and what we did is developed a survey that is before you that is the minimal set of things that are not available in other surveys that we think would be necessary to know for the board to engage in a meaningful conversation about strategy which is about future goals future vision what big ideas we want to
230coalesce around and by the way that's quite different than implementation and execution frequently those two things get a little mixed up so at this point we're at the point where we want to survey parents of our 9 000 students to discern their wants desires expectations goals points of view about where they want greenwich public schools to go in the future um our committee just uh by way has been working on this for a long time we're not really that far off cycle we were always delayed in putting the survey out because we had other surveys that were in front of parents particularly the work that got scheduled for the special education assessment we didn't want surveys crashing on top of parents at the same time so it would have been better if we had done
231this earlier in april uh but we are where we are and it we're not that far off schedule just by way of background our committee met eight times for an elapsed time of two full days to develop this survey uh there was a lot of back and forth um i operate where we haven't brought it forward until we could get a unanimous vote out of the committee um i could have pushed this through with a not unanimous vote much earlier but i did not want to do that i tend not to work that way i didn't bring something forward to the board that doesn't have the unanimous support and all the different stakeholders who were participating in our committee uh were heard and their wants desires inputs were incorporated just by way of [Music] recognizing
232people who support us i'd really particularly like to thank jennifer negrin for those of you don't know jennifer she's a long time gps parent volunteer her kids have now moved on into great colleges coming out of greenwich high school but she is a well-recognized expert in research and analytics she used to run research and analytics at the largest public relations organization in the world and she was the executive vice president about that so we're really thankful to have her expertise um reviewing and guiding us in the preparation of the survey and fortunately she's agreed to kind of help us in addition to running her own consultancy uh in between and it was really helpful uh the survey is before you and in the interest of time i'm sure you've all read it it has four
233sections in it uh just highlight the first section is to try to determine what parents know and think about the current strategy and that'll help inform us a lot going forward um then it's to try to discern attitudes and confirm attitudes about um what parents want their school system to be and focus on and what they want it to be in the future um tony jones asked us to um add a section to discern community attitudes about educational equity and whether uh how people think about that as a challenge in the district so we added that that's section number three and then section number four is to ask parents to prioritize what they think is important in their education of their children because strategy is always about choosing where to focus um not always what
234to add it's actually a process of focus and reduction um but it's also the purpose of that section is to um get feedback from the public about what they think we do well and where we think we could improve so the survey is before you we'd like to take any input that you have we want to take that answer any questions you have uh karen and and i karen and karen and i will be a triple act in this thing and um [Music] we want to get any feedback and then our plan is to move into execution put this in the field in uh early may all right before we uh take from all the members i don't know if karen hirsch or karen kowalski wanted to add anything i know you've uh you've been
235part of this process as well so this is i'll add something so it just to give you some background background on how we came to our process over the course of time we did through we looked at other strategic plans throughout the country in various school districts looking at school districts that seemed a lot like ours both from a size component as well as um just geographics uh to make sure that we could you know have a model to work off of so we did that as well as we looked at various other surveys we also took into account surveys that are also going out in our district at various times that we could be using data from we wanted to make sure that this survey in particular um noting noting that parents could have
236survey fatigue at this point given everything that we've asked them to do was very direct and to the point in order to get to what we thought um were the most to get the most information that we could out of the fewest questions as possible um so through the the a lot of research that um all of us did i'll no karen hurst did a tremendous amount of research as we all know on the board she's really good at it uh helped out tremendously we worked through a whole host of questions making sure that everything was that we could get this captured into to again get the most information we could uh based upon as i said models from other jurisdictions other school districts that we thought were characteristically similar to ours thank you karen
237hurst do you want to weigh in as well um we we did we reviewed a ton of surveys including the ones that we've shared with parents in the past and the committee certainly did agree on um areas that we wanted to get feedback from parents on um you know i know we also need to uh survey the staff as uh whatever we put forward is something that they'll have to uh to be able to deliver on um you know i i know there were differences of opinion on on how things were worded and and things that were um uh included um and you know which is why we're sort of bringing some of this forward to the board to i guess look through an opined so that we can sort of make sure that we
238have something that uh that is gonna get us the best data possible for us to revise our current strategic plan um sort of to make sure that we deliver to every single student the uh the best education and uh quality education that we can and that's sort of where i'm at thank you all right miss downey um okay a couple of questions um first talked about getting information from other key stakeholders i assume that means staff and students how are we going to go about getting that information well um some of it we already have because they've been surveyed over the past few years uh you uh the other thing you should know uh which i think we've shared before is because the board's gotten this background uh the most important thing you should know
239is on an annual basis right as a board we've even commissioned some surveys of students that have been done by the administration so that information is there and available and you feel that's rel i mean just in terms of the types of questions those past surveys have asked you what you want and that was we looked at we looked at the questions but everybody else should do it too um the most important one is the panorama survey because the panorama survey is a lot about student engagement you know is it relevant is it working for you so on and so forth it also tends to get at questions that karen hirsch was particularly concerned about which is the degree of family and community engagement we had a lot of debate about that i you know
240i think you get a lot about family and community engagement my own view as a strategist doing this in in my real life is critical critical question but it's really that's about implementation and execution and it's less about strategy but um important nonetheless so as an example um what we agreed to do is working with dr jones they're generating now she and jen lao i believe it is um are generating uh the next version of panorama which will go out in may and she does not have the questions yet and they will pull them from a question bank that's available from the people who provide panorama as well as custom questions and we've asked karen hirsch uh to be our liaison from the strategy committee to working with tony jones and gen wow uh particularly
241so that those kinds of questions uh are reflected in whatever comes up in this next version of the panorama survey to your point there but i could now just by doing this in may and panorama is going to be in may and the points that several people made already about survey fatigue do we think it's really wise to be doing them in in a relatively close time frame because are people going to just tune out or we've talked we talked about that it's a really good question we talked about it [Music] um so i think what makes sense is this should be in flight the first week in may panorama will be in flight at the end of may and that will be a buffer uh between those two panorama also has panorama also has
242other audiences mm-hmm so this one we're not right about cannibalization that they do one and not the other i'm not but if you crash them on top of each other one week right after the other yeah so if this if we delay all this then we need to reorganize ourselves all right i'm good i would just add to that point look i think if you spread them out by you know three to four weeks i think that's the right time period to spread them out by but i also think that um and what we do think is that there are some helpful data points in the panorama survey as there have been in the past um along similar questions so we would essentially be getting you know similar we'd be getting data right and answering
243from both surveys relatively in the same time period which i think would be helpful in trending the mindset and the understanding of the of the parent and the audience at the target audience in shaping the strategic you know our strategic plan going forward so there wouldn't be a a delay or staleness in the data that we're looking at okay i think the other thing is just to set expectations guys um don't think of this as absolute that's the problem with it people tend to think of this as absolute what you have to do is you have to get out there you have to get information then you're going to learn something and if it if it validates things that we know that we have already learned by looking at longitudinal data that we already have
244then that's good because it's validating but we should totally be open to i know i am i would encourage everybody else to think hey if three or four things come up we might have to go create another survey may not be with parents maybe we targeted it at staff that's too rigid to support a successful strategy process and what is the plan to survey the staff okay so panorama will get the parents and the students and this would be for the parents and then where does the staff component come in well it depends on what you want to know right so well if if we're talking about our strategic plan and we're talking about you're saying all stakeholders right i mean they're a significant stakeholder because they're implementing our strategic plan on a daily basis
245so how what are we going to survey them or we can do focus groups what is the plan to get their input as i said it depends on what you're trying to ask and i think what we've talked about is depending on what we need to know we would run that through tony and then tony would figure out dr jones would figure out how best to collect that information from the staff um my understanding is from conversations we've had particularly last november when we talked about these surveys is tony has a whole plethora of mechanisms by which she connects with the staff whether that be through her staff meetings through focus groups through informal conversations and what have you we tried not to get in the middle of that christina and dictating i think the
246important part as it relates to the staff is the way we've approached this is and as i say the staff has been surveyed so we already have some data is it the most current you know we we could go make this an exercise we're trying not to do that we're trying to get it focused and you feel confident that to the extent whatever metric whatever hit ratio on parents you have you feel that this will elicit the data that you need to move forward that we need that we need yeah you we you the committee we well i i really think it's important because you if you think about this this is data that is going to provide a framework an insight to where when we sit there because the step that comes after this
247is we sit down as a group and we look at this and we say what does it tell us and then we need to move on to a conversation that says what do we want our um what do we think about our current strategy and what as a group in a workshop uh if we think we need to make significant changes to that somebody says i want to give you an example based on the feedback i think we should toss out uh personalized learning and do something else okay that that's we're trying to get information so that's an informed conversation not just eight people sitting around the table opining okay um and so i i have a couple of little points but i'm not going to bother works now go ahead here i'll just shoot
248you an email with my my thoughts on some of the questions okay all right and do me a favor just come you can copy all three of us i was planning to do so yeah yeah okay so yeah i just did not use time up at our meeting so thank you all right miss olson um uh same i may shoot an email just with like a question or two but um just as a well thank you for doing this first of all and and just um just as a as a uh general question or comment i guess you know in the beginning it says like 27 questions should take about 20 minutes to complete and i i'm sure you probably already cut it down right i'm sure you probably already are trying to pick like
249the most important um you know cut into sub sections and trying to pick the most important i'm just thinking of myself and my own family you know two working parents three kids and if i was like oh this server is gonna take me 20 minutes you know i might be like okay i'll do tomorrow and if if there's a way to somehow and i know we need to get data and i know we need to get feedback you're you know trying to get parent feedback it needs to be specific um if there's a way to and then if i had another one come out like three weeks or maybe four weeks later and i was like didn't i just do a 20-minute survey like that's how i would feel that's just me and um but
250that's just maybe i'm stretched too thin which i probably am but um if there's a way to condense it or somehow a way to make it slightly less long i feel like you may get more people participating yes um let me just say this again uh we had eight meetings uh as karen kowalski said you know there was a lot of people i should say a few people giving lots of input um i i'm where you are i would have this thing even shorter than what it is but um this is the consensus that came from the three of us and uh you know incorporating dr jones's requests so um this is what we're this is the compromise to get there but i really appreciate your feedback all right dr jones um just two just
251two quick items on um going back to christina's question we usually do a teacher survey towards the end of the year and we're working on that it's some of the questions really aren't applicable during covid um it's so and we are also trying to on the panorama side to condense um to answer megan's question so that you know we can get rid of some of that fatigue the other thing is just to keep in mind that we you know we'll try to space them out but whether or not we can actually do this particular survey the first week in may just keep in mind next week is the last week in april and that we haven't discussed this and it hasn't started we haven't started building it uh inside the survey software so we just
252don't know how long it will take um generally it would be either jin lao or myself that would build that and jen is also the person that oversees all of our um in gss testing s back so she's doing a lot right now and and she runs the remote school on the back end so we're going to work as quickly as we can i just want to set realistic expectations um that we'll get it done but whether or not it's the first week in may it's just going to depend once we get in to start doing the work how long it actually takes thank you uh i want to take a moment to thank the committee members you got several uh sets of draft minutes up today but you're still missing the five early meetings
253it would be great if you could get those posted so that we can see the work that was done there and i think you guys are planning to vote on them at some point in the near future so that would be good to close that loop um i too am concerned about timing uh you know even before dr jones just mentioned not having built this i'm concerned about where we are in the year it's the end of the year there's a lot going on you know in terms of priorities you know panoramas really really uh important i understand the importance of this too we need to balance that out um i absolutely don't recall staff being as the staff being involved enough in the decisions that were made around the last strategic plan in fact
254i'd be uh anxious to hear from carol about her recollections on that but i i don't think there was enough that staff involvement and since they're part of the i think it's basically a uh you know there's four legs to this there's the board there's the administration there's the staff and there's the parents right and and if we're only uh looking at a couple of those we're gonna miss out on i think what would be very very valuable input uh and to to put it on dr jones to figure out what the right questions are that's our job uh quite frankly there are probably different questions and we're going to ask the parents in terms of the questions and i know people don't want to spend the time to do this but i think you
255know it's a public meeting this is where we're supposed to do this uh and the demographic screener which is your first set where you know it says we're going to be asking about relevant subgroups and and uh middle school and all the rest we don't the two questions that are shown on the page are actually uh are any of your children attending or have attended a college or university we're not even asking them what school their kids are going to and the next question is did you or your children attend did your children did your child or children who attended college university graduate from greenwich high school so this is a parent survey i'm not sure why we're asking college questions on the next section we're very focused on personalized learning but if you go
256back and look at the strategic plan there's actually three goals there there's the academic the personal and the interpersonal we're not asking about those at all the other thing i'd ask the committee to do is make sure that's the right definition of personalized learning because it's changed so many times through the years i i frankly don't know what the current definition is and and it's probably worth worth double checking that uh and then when we get into the meat of it which is i think really what we what we're most curious about is that the the focus the strengths the weaknesses you're asking them to rank order 18 items on a one-to-seven scale that's just excessive for for a survey that you know you're asking parents to invest time in there's got to be a
257better way to do that um i just think it's it's a lot of work i know as a uh as a person who gets surveyed all the time professionally i probably would walk away from this one so i don't know how to better do that i know why you're doing it because i i know enough about building a survey that the data would be amazingly useful i just think from a usability standpoint that's not gonna that's not gonna get uh get a lot of responses and i think that that presents its own set of problems so anyway those are those are my high level thoughts at this point i'm not going to try to wordsmith your questions but but i think we're missing on the demographic we're not asking the right questions to figure out
258what like yeah peter i um so uh there's a piece of information you're missing i appreciate you asking the question um a demographic screener is standard um we originally in the first draft we got which came from that area of it came from jennifer negron the expert there were two people on the committee who objected to using a screener some of the questions that were in the screener in an effort to eliminate endless debate about that we decided to use the standard one that's in the tool that we're using which is surveymonkey you guys can go look it up if you want it's a six or seven question thing but on some of these areas of this survey unfortunately in the preparation of it [Music] you know it went for